My Response to Hugh Halter’s Five Questions
Recently (okay…about a month ago now) Hugh Halter posted “Five Questions that Only US Church Planters Ask.” I’d encourage you to check out the post. He doesn’t answer any of the questions, but rather spends some time talking about how church without answers to these questions is the beginning of true Kingdom living. For the sake of those of you who didn’t click the link, the five questions are:
1) But what do we do with our kids?
2) But what if my spouse doesn’t like to have people over?
3) What happens when my funding runs out.
4) How can I get Christians from other churches to join my core team?
5) How should I handle church discipline? (always from reformed camps)
So, my goal isn’t to answer any of these questions, either. But I know these questions are on the minds of many church planters, and my question is, why? Why are we consumed with these questions? What’s the motivation behind the questions? You can catch my thought in the order they were asked, below:
1) Kids can simultaneously be our idol and something we consider a distraction. Society pushes us to make our children into the perfect versions of ourselves we always wanted. We want them to have all of our talents but none of our hangups. Yet, in many church environments, the kids aren’t welcomed. They are either trained to sit still and color or shipped off to another environment where they can be as loud and distracting as they want. Our kids become a distraction when we believe they “interrupt what God is doing” instead of being participants in what God is doing. Our response to both of these extremes is repentance. Repentance for believing we can find salvation in our perfect “mini-me’s” and repentance for believing our meetings are more important than our children. Once we repent, the answer to this question is much easier.
2) It’s important to be clear that God values hospitality as a character trait of eldership (1 Timothy 3:2) and that both the husband and his spouse’s character is in question. My hope is those asking these questions are proto-elders, elders in training, or consider themselves elders already. I’m concerned when these sorts of questions come up, though, because it’s clear that one person in the marriage is more committed to the mission (which includes inviting the least of these into our homes) and the other is less committed. A spouse that isn’t given over to hospitality isn’t ready for eldership and a spouse that isn’t ready is a married couple who isn’t ready. Stop. Take the time to get on the same page as your spouse. Don’t let the dream of ministry be the altar you sacrifice your marriage on. Take however long it needs to take for her (or his?) heart to change. Be patient with Jesus and your spouse and let Him bring you both together into mission.
3) My hope when someone asks this is that it’s a sincere question. I’ve seen more churches dissolve because of a lack of funding than I’ve seen dissolve because of a sin issue. In the heart of many Americans, church planting is a route to a job. We must repent of the idea that the church exists to fund us. Period. So if the funding runs out, you need to get a job. Yes, the church will get less of your time. But you’re in this because you wanted to equip God’s people and reach the lost, right? So your funding running out is the perfect time to get a secular job, meet broken people, and equip others to some of the work you’re not able to do. Read BiVo. It will help.
4) At the heart of this question is the idea that church planting means growing a fully functioning church as quickly as possible. This is called transplant growth and it does almost nothing to grow the Kingdom. Why not start with two or three dedicated people and reach out to lost people exclusively? If your answer has something to do with finances, see #3. Turn away people from other churches or better yet help them start doing the same thing you are. They are needed in the harvest as well. And you’re in this to reach the lost, right? [nods head] Good, me too.
5) Ironically, this issue is the one issue Hugh addresses. I think Hugh hits the nail on the head. Many who think this way are afraid of sin in others and want to control it. I just want to add this: Be deeply involved with the people who are part of your church. Don’t just attend a meeting with them. Go to dinner with them. Play a sport with them. Share lives 24/7 with them. You will find all sorts of things wrong with these people. They will do the same with you, most likely. And then when you’ve earned the right to talk about sin with them, tell them about sin and point them toward Jesus with love. Call them higher, like a father. And if you do, 9 times out of 10, you will win your brother (Galatians 6:1-3). Spiritual discipline is so much easier and much more helpful if you do it because you love people and are in the trenches with them.
My point is this: these issues strike at the heart of “the American Gospel Enterprise,” a phenomenon where the church is treated like a business and we try to live off the benefits. Our current system encourages us to create a distraction free bubble where the meetings are entertainment-based and not an invitation into life together. Because people want this, crowds gather for this type of meeting and bring money that can support the people who lead it. But this is not the church as Jesus intended. Where these issues touch your heart (and hurt), repent. Begin to live like Jesus and the apostles and less like the latest church planting book you’ve read. Once you do, these issues will be much, much clearer.
So, there’s my responses to Hugh’s Five Questions. No one asked me. This is in no way endorsed by Hugh nor do I expect a response from him. I would take feedback, however, so if you’re reading this, please leave a comment and let me know if I missed something.
Photo Credit: Question Box by Raymond Branson
Kingdom Investment and Apostolic Travel
A couple of months back I was having a conversation on twitter with ApostleFarm about how apostles travel great distances to invest in the next generation of Kingdom leaders. Having seen some of that in Africa, I shared a little bit about the experience, but intended to write a blog post to share more in detail. After thinking about the topic some I decided that a video blog might be a better venue for sharing what I’ve learned.
So with no further ado, here is my video blog about apostolic travel for Kingdom advancement. Make sure to stick around for the last couple of minutes where I discuss what I believe is one secret that I think gets missed by most western apostolic workers.
Thanks for watching the video blog. Have you ever seen apostolic travel in action either here or abroad? What can you learn from the examples you’ve seen? Let me know in the comment section.
Review: Viral Jesus by Ross Rohde
This is my personal review of “Viral Jesus” by Ross Rohde. You can also find this review posted online at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. In the interest of full disclosure, Ross was kind enough to provide me with a free copy in exchange for an honest review of the book.
Christianity was designed to spread like a virus, moving from person to person, contact point to contact point, quickly changing people and making them an agent of change. That all came to an end after a sustained period of growth several hundred years after Jesus’ resurrection. The church slowly abandoned it’s commitment to the “epidemic principles” they were founded on and adopted a different method of living. This is the premise of Ross Rhode’s new book, Viral Jesus. According to Rhode, though, these “epidemic principles” can be recaptured and a viral Christianity can again become the norm.
I had been eagerly anticipating the release of Viral Jesus ever since Rhode began blogging at Viral Jesus a few years ago. If you’ve read the blog or enjoy the missional house church/ organic church/ simple church discussion, you will certainly find an enjoyable read in this book. But this is not just another book about doing house church. This is a book about spreading the Lordship of Jesus throughout a society, something that house churches become a vehicle for. This is a radically different approach than most “house church” books take, but it was incredibly helpful.
I want to offer one warning up front before I continue with the review: Do not read this book if you’re looking to transition into a new church fad. This book is fairly unique and it will not give you step by step instructions for getting new converts. This book presents Jesus Christ as Lord, both of the world and of the church, and that means you won’t find strategies that work apart from Him. Rohde takes a lot of necessary time presenting this truth and because of that, someone only wanting change without prayerfully submitting to Jesus would get very frustrated. But if you desire to follow the real Jesus into His harvest field, this book will be both incredibly helpful and challenging, but well worth the read.
Strengths
The first obvious strength of this book is the fact that it presents Jesus as the operating system for life, both inside and outside the church. This is not a how-to book. It forces you to acknowledge the ways in which you’ve been dependent on other things besides Jesus, especially in the church. Rohde significantly develops the idea of “Jesus as Lord” that Hirsch and Frost discuss in books like “The Shaping of Things to Come” and “The Forgotten Ways.” But instead of developing the theology of “Jesus as Lord” Rohde presents very tangible examples from Scripture and experience of “Jesus as Lord” playing out in the life of the church.
One of the things I appreciated in the book was it’s strong endorsement of supernatural phenomenon in the life of Jesus movements. Most of the current books on church planting and organic church argue for returning to most of the principles of the book of Acts, but spend little or no time discussing the place miracles plays. This is confusing because it is one of the most prominent features of the early church. I suspect that because Rohde truly believes that the Lordship of Christ is the issue for viral Christianity to be restored, he has no problem presenting the Holy Spirit as active and involved if we submit to Jesus. I can’t emphasize enough that these two issues need to be stressed over and over in the organic church conversation, and that fact alone makes Rohde’s book an invaluable contribution to the discussion.
Another strength of the book are the multiple stories Rohde tells about the adventures he and his co-workers have in the harvest field. These stories take place in locations where many people think the Gospel is irrelevant, hardened Western Europe and California, and they make the principles Rohde lays out believable. I’ve heard plenty of stories about miracles and conversions happening in America and Europe, but Rohde tells the stories in ways that make everyone believe they are capable of doing the same. He and his friends aren’t the heroes of the stories, Jesus is, and because of that you gain faith you can participate in similar stories yourself.
Finally, Rohde’s chapters on Viral Evangelism and Viral Church Planting are worth the price of the book. Both chapters are a look at how, once submitted to Jesus, a believer is typically led by Him to share the gospel and see churches started. Rohde makes evangelism and church planting a joy, not a burden, and accessible to everyone. I’m actually going to list this book in the evangelism section of my Amazon bookstore because it so easily encourages and trains believers in basic principles for sharing their faith and planting churches.
Weaknesses
The one weakness I found in the book is it’s treatment of the historical Jesus movements of the past. Rohde traces the fall of the early church away from the “epidemic principles” it was originally founded upon. He then looks at times throughout history most Christians would call revivals and dissects how these revivals missed turning into full-fledged Jesus movements that God had intended. I think this is the point where most Christians would have problems. However, I actually agree with Rohde on most of the issues he presents as problems.
Rohde argues that each of these revivals were short-circuited because they didn’t completely abandon the trappings of Christendom that they emerged out of. Because of that, these revivals eventually died down and became trapped in a dead religious state that they had been awakened out of. I don’t even disagree with Rohde on this point. However, what was written seemed to imply that even though God moved powerfully many different times, these Jesus movements continually fell back into the Christendom mindsets they emerged out of. Can a viral Christianity emerge in a country where Christendom is present and operating? I believe it can and I even think Rohde believes it can, but I walked away from the chapter having to truly process these thoughts out.
In the end, I believe that even this was helpful, because these chapters forced me to examine where I’ve compromised with foundational principles of the world in my Christian experience. But my hope is that even though much of Christianity in the West is still steeped in Christendom, that viral Christianity lived out in front of the rest of the church will actually convince the church of the validity of abandoning many of the Christendom principles it has built itself on.
Should You Read Viral Jesus?
Yes, yes, and yes! You will be encouraged, stretched, and challenged in ways you cannot imagine. Rohde is really balanced in a radical, Jesus-following way. Reading this book will push you in the most healthy direction you’ve been pushed in awhile—closer to Jesus. If you’ve never been part of an organic church this a great book to get you started. If you’ve read every book by every guy about church planting movements and house churches, this is still a really helpful and inspiring book. And this is not a book for leaders, it’s a book for everyone, because viral Christianity is for everyone.
Because of all of this, I want to recommend you pick a copy of this book, take a journal and a Bible with you, and go and wrestle with the issues Rohde presents. My hope is that it causes Jesus movements to spring up throughout the West and changes Christianity as we know it.
Cluster Map
Pursuing Glory 