Missional Discipleship Practices, 2: Community

The call to discipleship may be received individually, but it's lived in community.

That makes some of us uncomfortable.  Our relationship with Jesus--if we have one--is personal.  What we may read in Scripture or hear in sermons or encounter in books we process asking, "What does this mean in my life?"  Faith, like so much else in our culture, is often seen as a private possession.  And because we're not always comfortable with what we think we understand about our faith, we're reluctant to put ourselves in a position where we feel compelled to share of what we know.  It might be wrong.  It might sound stupid.

Yet God always calls people--even leaders--into community.  You can pretty much search Scripture in vain for the story of an individual called by God to be alone.  And so it was with Jesus: the disciples, called individually, but called to live their discipleship in community with and for others.  And with the early church (see the book of Acts): Christians called to live and worship and serve in community.

There's good reason for this, and it has nothing to do with safety in numbers or that it's easier to remain anonymous.

• First, the Holy Spirit often speaks to us through the words and lives of others. 
• Second, living our faith with others makes accountability easier. 
• Third, communities provide support and can accomplish together what individuals alone cannot. 
• Fourth, for all our cultural emphasis on individualism, our lives tend to be organized into groups anyway (not that all groups are communities, but we are used to living our lives with others whether at work or at the gym or in the neighborhood).

So: we are called to live our relationship with Jesus integrated into a community of like-minded people, an integration that, over time, we seek to deepen.  But "community" doesn't mean just like-minded people.  It also means living with people who aren't working to follow Jesus. 

This is, partly, unavoidable.  We share our lives with people who have no apparent interest in Jesus.  But, equally, it's intentional.  Do-you-know-Jesus-Christ-as-your-Lord-and-Savior doesn't work.  In-your-face proselytizing of any kind doesn't work.  It's the kind of thing that gives Christians a bad name.  The point, in fact, is not to proselytize at all.  The point is simply to live life together, letting how we live say all we need to say about following Jesus.

And living in community doesn't necessarily mean going to church.  Not that there's anything wrong with going to church.  We should go to church.  But for too long Christians have equated "being in community" with "being in church."  Look at Jesus himself: how often did he gather with people to break bread or to teach, and how often did he gather them to go to church?  Being in church should be an outgrowth of being in community, not the other way around.

Some Scripture: Luke 5:1-11
                            Acts 2:43-47  

Missional Discipleship Practices, 1: Live Small

Discipleship, ultimately, is about Jesus. But it starts with me.

Those two great truths of discipleship about who I can trust and what I can control mean that the path to discipleship has to begin with me. And that means taking a hard look at how I understand myself and choices I’m making about how I live.

First, because I don’t live in a vacuum, I need to be aware of what the culture of which I’m part tells me about who I am and how I should live.

What contemporary American culture tells me is that I am what I do, where I live, and what I own; that my happiness, my sense of self-worth and, ultimately, my security, are in material wealth. So it follows: the more I have, the more I am. And because I should always want to be more, I should always strive to have more. It makes the economic world go ‘round.

It also tells me that I should live for me (my own desires should define my life) and, if I have one, my family. Others live for themselves and their families. Each person, each family—autonomous. I don’t need to be concerned with how my life choices might impact anyone else.

Collectively, this helps explain why I live trusting myself first and foremost and why I believe that through my own efforts and material success, I can control most of what happens to me.

Yet Jesus says something rather different.

• My identity and security are not in what I own so that the more I have, the better I am. I can lose all of that tomorrow. My identity and security are in my relationship with Jesus. 
• Choices I make about my life don’t impact only my life or the life of my family. Depending upon the choice, it can impact my neighbor, my employees, my community, people across the state, across the country, across the ocean. My responsibility as a human being doesn’t begin and end with me.

Consequently, the first discipleship practice: live small. We’ve all heard about “living large.” It’s the profile of a successful life: a lot of stuff, a lot of space, a lot of energy. But as disciples of Jesus Christ, we’re called to live small.

Living small is not just about the size of my consumption footprint. It’s about recognizing that my life is not about me. It’s the kind of life Jesus modeled during his earthly ministry: life lived mindful of our obligation to others.

I can think of it as striving for low maintenance living. That doesn't mean asceticism. It means mindfulness: knowing how much is enough, sensitivity to how my life impacts others, awareness of my responsibility to help others. The less energy I require to maintain my life, the more energy I have for living. For Jesus, for my family, for others, for me.

 Some Scripture: Luke 9:46-48; 12:13-21

                            Matthew 20:20-28

Two Great Truths of Discipleship

Discipleship...I believe there are two great truths:

• the only one you can trust completely is Jesus Christ

• the only thing over which you have complete control is how much of your life you choose to trust to Jesus Christ

The bottom line of what discipleship is about is accepting and learning to live these two truths.

As great truths go, these two are straight-forward enough, but unpacking them will take some time.  Unpacking them we must do, though, because they are foundational to all we think we know about living for the Kingdom.

It's easy to make a list of those people and institutions we don't always completely trust: the government, the boss, the media.  At the same time, there are those we want to believe we can completely trust--our spouse, our significant other, our friends--and we count ourselves blessed if we can.  The reality is, however, that all these people are still human, and because they are human they are broken, and because they are broken they can fail.  Which means they can fail us.  This isn't cynicism.  It's the consequence of a fallen, sinful creation.

Jesus, on the other hand, will never fail us, will always be there for us, will always care for us.

We are control freaks.  It isn't a question of if, only of how much.  We like to believe that if we just work hard enough, hoard enough, hold on enough, that we can control just about everything that comes our way.  But that's one of the great lies of the human condition.  In the proverbial flash of an eye, everything we think we have, all the control we think we possess, can be taken away, and there's nothing we can do about it.  Anything we think we can control, we can't.

Except this: we can control how much of our lives we choose to trust to Jesus.

Everything we do in the name of discipleship rises or falls on our willingness to trust Jesus with our lives. 

How do you understand the relationship between trust in Jesus and discipleship?

The Importance of Discipleship to Community Groups

Community groups, incarnational communities, fellowship groups, mission groups--a rose by any other name, as it were, but whatever we choose to call them, they're central to the implementation of a missional/incarnational church.  But they can also pose a real challenge, especially for a traditional congregation transitioning to a missional/incarnational congregation.

Partly it's that DNA thing again.  New churches, starting from scratch, and especially if they're reaching out to the unchurched, can make community groups part of who and what they are from the proverbial get-go.  Living your walk with the Lord in a community group is just part of what it means to do and be church.

But, for traditional churches especially, it's also about baggage.  People in traditional congregations hear "community groups," they think "small groups."  Small group ministries of various stripes have been church staples for decades.  For many people, their experience of small groups was positive; for just as many, however, the experience was something else...a weekly commitment to forced intimacy that made them profoundly uncomfortable.  The idea of yet another small group experience...no thanks..been there, done that.

And there is the matter of time.  Being in a community group is just one more thing to have to make time for in a schedule already begging for mercy.

We're very mindful of all this as we gear up to launch our first community groups.  And because we are, we've come to the conclusion that the success of our community groups hinges on us first emphasizing the importance of discipleship.  We're certainly not alone in this.  Mike Breen, among others, has argued that apart from a discipleship process, community groups and missional/incarnational church are doomed to failure.  The key, we believe, is in educating our congregation that Christian discipleship, rightly understood, is naturally lived out in a community group.  Such groups, in fact, are the best expression of living life under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.  This is not pedagogical slight-of-hand, either.  The Scriptural, theological, and ecclesiastical basis for such an approach is sound.

Further, it's not about forced intimacy.  It's about living your life with others. Appropriate levels of intimacy may naturally develop as a result, but there is no performance expectation as far as intimacy is concerned.  Besides, we're all already living our lives with groups of people anyway.  It's a matter of doing so with some intentionality because that's where our discipleship to Jesus and the work of the Kingdom leads us.

So, we're really working on ways to explain, explore, and emphasize discipleship as a necessary foundation for launching our community groups.  In the coming weeks and months, I'll document what we discover.    

In the meantime, we're interested in hearing about your experience.  How have you defined discipleship vis-a-vis community groups?  What role does discipleship training play in involving people in community groups?

Of Wineskins and Garments

I've written in the past about the fact that one of the challenges of leading a traditional church through the transformative process of becoming a missional/incarnational church is the need to nurture both simultaneously. A decision to go missional and, from the get-go, leave traditional behind is, to my mind, a denial of responsibility. Becoming missional is, almost by definition, a process, a movement of people from one way of living--not just one way of being church--to another. As such, it takes time: traditional and missional will exist side-by-side, and the timetable for coexistence is up to the Holy Spirit, not to me.

But...I've been spending time in Luke 5 lately and there is that business of the parable of the new wineskins. Jesus clearly is talking about new ways of being God's people and while he never mentions the word "church" how can we read his words and not think about the organizations and institutions of the faith? And if we do, it seems equally clear that Jesus is telling us that the old and the new cannot exist simultaneously without compromise at best, damage at worst.

Jesus, first in terms of garments, then wineskins, sets out that there is the old and the new. Further, he acknowledges that the old is torn which, read in terms of the church, can refer to the old ways wearing out or to actual splits in congregations and denominations. In either case, the new cannot be patched on to the old because that both disfigures the new and results in an old that is no longer of a piece. Shifting metaphors, Jesus makes it plain that old ways of being cannot hold new ways of being without ruining the old.

What Jesus' parable suggests to me is not that we must abandon traditional ways of being church but that we must not make the mistake of thinking that somehow we can piece together a viable expression of the Body of Christ using some traditional here, some missional/incarnational there. Or, to put it another way, we can't mend tears in old ways of being church with bits and pieces of new ways. And Jesus also reminds me that those who've always known the old will likely always prefer the old.

Damage is something I want to avoid, certainly to minimize. Maybe, therefore, for a time compromise is inevitable. But hasn't compromise always been inevitable? Indeed, any expression of the will of God that utilizes broken human beings can hardly be otherwise. But if we must compromise, let us do so faithfully, expecting that garments and wineskins old and new are to be in service not to comfort or vision but to the Kingdom.

Relationship First, Church Second

The other night something happened that reminded me yet again of how much the cultural landscape has changed for the church.

Every week, a neighborhood here in Longmont hosts what's really a big outdoor party.  In a park in the middle of the neighborhood they bring in a live band and food trucks.  People bring lawn chairs, buy dinner, listen to the band, and they talk with one another.  And as they talk with one another, relationships are furthered or, I imagine, started.  It's a diverse crowd, but mostly 30-somethings with their kids.  It is a very family-friendly environment.

I couldn't help but think: here is a microcosm of the future of the church.  Here is our mission field.  They will gather--hundreds of them--for food trucks and live music.  Mostly, though, I'm convinced, they will gather because of relationships they already have (many obviously were there with friends) or, as they meet people, to form new ones.  I saw very few people who appeared to be there alone.  It was an experience they wanted because it was an experience they could share. 

How many of them, I wondered, would be there if this was church?  Even with the food trucks and the live band.  If it were church, that's typically how it'd work: we'd identify a spot, bring in a band and food trucks, do some publicity, and see who shows up.  And my guess is, it wouldn't be 1/100 the number there the other evening.

Thus, the change in the cultural landscape for the church.  And it's about relationships.  Used to, people came to church and, once they were there, formed relationships.  Church first, relationships second.  Now, people form relationships and only then, if at all, would they form a church.  Relationships first, church second.  Another missional reality: before we can be church with anyone in our mission field, we first have to be friends.  

Talk Less, Preach More

I just finished preaching five weeks on the book of James, which I wrapped-up not with words from James but from Paul. Familiar words, from his letter to the church at Corinth:

For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.  Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

Paul's words ring with a special resonance for the missional/incarnational church. For people who are products of a post-Enlightenment, postmodern, post-Christendom mindset, the fundamental tenets of Christianity are, well, ridiculous.  But, no--such has been the case since Jesus himself: the message about the cross, Paul writes, is foolishness.

In a world where people increasingly tune out the claims of institutionalized religion even as they scan the cultural soundscape for spiritual frequencies that ring true, followers of Jesus can no longer preach Christ crucified with words alone.  We must, as James would tell us, let the way we live preach for us...be doers of the Word. 

As a church elder said to me last night, we Presbyterians sure like to hear ourselves talk.  Indeed.  Our mission field has tuned out the talk.  They need to see faithful living.