Will You Hear?

I used to think I lived in a quiet neighborhood. When we started taking care of my granddaughter I realized I was completely mistaken. We live in a cacophony of chaotic commotion! Trucks roar, weed-whackers whack, edgers whine, mowers growl, airplanes rumble, and sirens wail. Murphy’s Law made sure that all the sounds came together at just the right time to awaken my granddaughter from her nap. How did I miss the noise? It may be the same way I tune out the noise of life going on around me. Busyness and self-interest, my agenda and my ambition, lead me to miss the important noise of life around me. I can so easily resemble Jesus’ description of hardheaded sinners who tune God out: “Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand” (Matthew 13:13). What awakens me to hear, to really hear again? New life. The cry from the cross, the rumble of the opening tomb, the words: “Broken and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins,” rouse me to life and show me that God treasures His children. With ears unstopped by the touch of Jesus, His mandate: “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to all creation” roars into my soul and enlivens me to hear God’s people and share His concern for them. In a span of only nine verses, Jesus uses the word “world” eleven times in John 17. The Greek word is “cosmos.” This term began as a word meaning “that which has been put into order, that which was adorned.” We translate it “world.” God sees it as his precious and beautiful handiwork of humanity. His concern is for the world. He hears His people and He cares. Will I? Will I live insulated in my own pursuits or will I hear people and respond to them? Will the church? Will we hear only our own internal “business” or will we hear the cries of the “cosmos” and respond? The “cosmos” begins in your home. In your life. In your community. Will you hear?

Bubba Mission

When Bubba Watson won the Masters golf tournament, he made Bubbaugusta history.  Commentators gushed about how an ordinary guy, a person who never took a golf lesson, a professional who didn’t have a cadre of coaches around him, proved that an ordinary man can win a major.  His improvised hook shot off the pine needles was lauded as Bubba creativity.  What carefully trained, meticulously coached, PGA groomed, institutionally produced golfer could even think of such a shot, let alone pull it off?

It’s a new era of ordinary winners.  Or, maybe it’s an era of remembering that golf is meant to be played by ordinary people.

Might the same be true of mission?

We’ve come through a generation and a half of carefully trained, meticulously coached, church-system groomed, institutionally produced ecclesiastical professionals.  What’s happened to the church?  The culture is losing faith in it.  The professionals are falling to the wayside in scandals--ala Tiger Woods.  The institutional prototype is turning people off.  People are leaving the church.

But there are some Bubba’s out there.  Ordinary women and men, people both young and old, are getting creative with the Gospel.  They’re meeting people where they live.  They’re personifying Jesus in their communities.  They’re inviting people into making Christ’s difference.  They’re looking outward and giving the genuine love and care of Jesus to people around them.  They’re meeting in homes, apartments, and coffee shops.  They’re sacrificing, starting non-profits, and traveling both near and far because they believe Jesus is the most important person for everyone to know.

And people are coming to faith in Him.  Around the world, the actions of ordinary people--of Bubba’s--are making Christianity the fastest growing faith movement on the planet.

Could your life use some Bubba mission?  Could your church?

Go for it, Bubba!

C & E No More

My daughter commented on Easter that it looked like even the Christmas and Easter attenders weren’t showing up for worship.  I looked around and agreed.

Times have changed.  I asked a young acquaintance of mine what she was doing for Easter.  Church was not in the plan.  Their families don’t attend church.  It isn’t a part of their lives.

The same is true of a good number of people in our culture, both young and old.  The church habit is slipping away.

The big question this presents believers with is: How will people hear about the hope we have in the risen Savior, Jesus?

If Christmas and Easter attenders are dwindling, if overall church attendance is declining, if the attractional, institutional church is losing its appeal, how will the Gospel invade the lives of the hopeless?

This is the question each believer and every church must wrestle with.  My thoughts?  Here they are:

1. The risen Christ isn’t boring or routine.  Christians need to be reminded about this in creative and compelling ways.

2. If the risen Christ is the source of true hope, Christians need to be ready to offer this hope in caring and appropriate ways within everyday relationships and encounters.  The church must exert new energy for the formation of every believer as a disciple in the trenches.

3. If the institutional church is no longer the center of the culture’s spiritual quest, the church must deploy to venues that allow believers to speak into the god conversation of the culture.  This will require great patience, strategic thinking, courageous action, and some radical retooling of budgets.

4. The church must trust that God really desires all to be saved.  As the paradigm of outreach shifts, Christians need to remember that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Lord’s Church.  Times and methods may change, but Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever!

Five Ways to Get Out of the (church) Box

1. Be the church where you are. The picture in this article is from a recent small group ministry effort of my friends in Africa. All they did was to find a shade tree and dig into the Word and prayer. Where can you bring Christ’s Church through serving, fellowship, prayer, and study?

2. Love on people in a local nursing home. Hundreds of elderly and disabled folks in our communities are lonely and forgotten. What if a handful of people from church invited non-churched friends from the community to gather with people there for conversation, songs, a brief devotion, and some games every week? The result would be a satellite congregation and many lives reached with the love of Jesus!

3. Deploy. What if you started a “preaching station” or a missional community in another part of town or in a town nearby? Why not stretch your boundaries by sending people to extend the reach of the Gospel?

4. Plant a church. What if you worked with your local Mission and Ministry Facilitator to seriously consider what it would take to get the right church planter on board to start a new ministry?

5. Serve. What if you blessed the community by finding a way to help make the community better? Talk with community leaders to see what needs exist. Then invite non-members to get involved with you. People will say yes to community service more often than to attending a church service. Let them see Jesus in action first!

Bandwidth

When the Internet gained popularity, I bit the bullet, plugged into my phone line, and began accessing the World Wide Web. After a click of the mouse, the dial tone sounded, followed by loud series of buzzes and electronic chatter. You might remember that distinctive sound. Then came the magic: a connection to the new electronic frontier.

Fast forward to 2012. If I had a dial-up connection today, you’d call me crazy. I’d be Internet impaired. The narrow bandwidth of dial-up would paralyze my ability to access the vast selection offered at the current online buffet. The bandwidth of high-speed technology has expanded connection possibilities.

Reggie McNeal talks about the bandwidth of the church. It’s something worth thinking about. Sometimes the church’s bandwidth narrows as it seeks to involve church people in church events. There’s a constant effort to get church members to sign up for, volunteer for, and join activities tailored for church people.

Statistics show, however, that 80% of the population is not church people. How can the bandwidth of the church be increased to reach the 80%?

This requires a paradigm shift. Instead of planning the church’s activities around church people, what if the church planned every action and formed every reason for invitation around the goal of engaging the non-churched?

People are craving relationships and purpose. What friend, co-worker, neighbor, or family member wouldn’t respond “yes” when you ask:

“Will you join me in helping to serve kids in need?”

“We’re going to hang out with and love on some elderly folks in a nursing home. Want to come along?”

“I need a partner for English as a Second Language instruction. Will you give me a hand?”

“A group is coming to my house to write encouragement cards to some people in need. Can you join us?”

“We’re going to make a meal for the blind in our community. Can you and your family help us?”

You get the idea. What can you do to grow your invitation pool beyond the church directory? How can you include the disconnected before you invite the already very busy church crowd? How can you help increase the bandwidth of the church so the 80% can experience the love of Jesus, too?

A New Neighborhood

Relationships are no longer centered on geography. When I was a kid, all the moms on the block knew each other, knew each other’s kids, and had the right to discipline any of the kids on the block. Families typically had one car--a car dad used to go to and from work. Neighbors talked over the backyard fence, got together to play cards, and combined efforts to form the winning bowling team at the local bowling alley.

Geography and neighborhood went hand in hand. But not anymore.

Sure, there are some neighborhoods that are cohesive and neighborly, but new “neighborhoods” have sprung up as people have become more mobile, more networked, and more selective about who their “neighbors” are.

“Anthropography” has replaced geography. People are choosing the people they hang with--and people are being thrown together in ways they never expected.

Unfortunately, the church may still get hung up on geography. True, geographical neighbors are important, but if Christians are told that their neighborhood is limited to the homes or apartment units that surround where they live, new neighborhoods and new opportunities to share the Gospel will be overlooked.

Some people spend more time with co-workers than with people from their subdivision. You may spend more time with people in school, or online, or at the remote main office, or at your kids’ soccer games, or in the dialysis lab than you do with people who live just a front yard away.

How is the church preparing itself to reach these new neighborhoods? How are believers reaching beyond geography? What’s your neighborhood and how will you bring Jesus to it?

Fad Resistance

My daughter was telling me the other day how she was sick of Tim Tebow. It wasn’t him, so much, but the constant media blitz about him. For a while he was counter-cultural, the hope of the grass roots and the outsider. Now he was mainstream, overplayed, imitated, the spokesperson for companies trying to make a profit.

This is what happens when something becomes too common, too hyped, too much a part of the established cultural flow. People start to resist. New and alternative movements cause a buzz of excitement. A mainstream fad causes resistance.

The tendency to bash the church is moving into fad territory. I watched the popular YouTube video “Jesus>Religion.” While it reflects today’s prevalent anti-institutionalism and this generation’s movement toward deconstruction of established systems, its slick and commercial appearance, along with a its faux alternative tone, show that church/religion-bashing has gone mainstream. In other words, the church is trying to lure people in by bashing itself. This has become a fad. And people see through fads. They don’t like them. They resist them.

So, as the church resists itself so people who really resist it will be attracted, the resistors of the church will resist the resisting. Got that?

What’s the answer? Ephesians 3:10 says that God’s intent was that “now, through the church, [His] manifold wisdom should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms.” The answer is for the church to be the church. Not to resist itself or bash itself or destroy itself, but to BE itself. That, because of the very nature of the church, IS alternative. The answer is to go back to the Savior Jesus who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, but shakes every generation from sin and complacency with His counter-cultural Word.

A church that has strayed from being the church need not jump on the bandwagon of bashing the church. There is no need to try to find self-righteousness in self-flagellation. On the other hand, a church that has strayed from being the church can’t sit tight in complacent inaction. Self-righteousness through self-satisfaction is off the mark, too. The church needs only to hear His call back to its first love, back to the Savior, back to being Christ’s church. The church is the always-new movement created by God to transform the world. It never was and never will be a fad.