What Are You Doing More Than Others?

As Jesus challenged His followers in the Sermon on the Mount, “What are you doing more than others?” (Mt. 5:48). Jesus’ intent was that the lives of His followers should be defined in dramatically different terms than the world around them. But is this really the case today? Line up ten strangers on the street and ask them, “What actions characterize Christians compared to those who are not Christians?” Responses will vary, from “they go to church” to “they pray before they eat.” Some answers might have political connotations: “they oppose abortion” or “they are against homosexuality.” Some answers may be downright negative: “they judge others more than most.” In the public’s eye, these are the types of things that define a Christian.

Though most of us have never attempted such an experiment, we instinctively know that these answers would characterize our findings. Jesus has called his followers to live radically, to “turn the world upside down” with their love for others and for one another. Yet to many outsiders, believers today are known not as passionate lovers but as right wing activists and members of a Sunday morning social club. But it was never Christ's intention that His church should be a people just like everyone else save for their political leanings and church attendance. The very essence of our very lifestyles should run in marked distinction to the rest of the world around us. Yet sadly, this is not the case for most believers today.

As the King James Version puts it in I Peter 2:9, followers of Christ should be “peculiar people.” That doesn’t mean we should weirder than the surrounding world, but that quite simply, our lifestyles should be different. Look at any Christian’s day planner and ask yourself how it differs from your average non-churchgoing suburbanite. Many of the calendar entries will be the same: work, soccer practice, music lessons, perhaps even a date night on weekends. In the vast majority of cases, in fact, the day timer will look exactly the same as nonbelievers except for one exception: church. Add Sunday morning church attendance, small groups at the church, midweek prayer meeting, and youth group activities, and the already harried schedule of the average suburbanite is ratched up to superhuman levels for the Christian. Nearly all Americans will admit they’re too as it is, but it seems that far too many Christians seem to believe that honoring God means continuing more of the same and adding church on top of it all. If the “life in all of its fullness” that Jesus intended for us means merely adding church events to the world’s overbooked schedule, that is a sad state of affairs indeed.

Face it: our lifestyles look exactly the same as the world’s, and this is beyond dispute. As Shane Claiborne says, “Christians pretty much live like everyone else; they just sprinkle in a little Jesus along the way.” However, the early church stood in marked contrast to the world around them; the difference in lifestyle between those early believers and the pagan culture around them was evident to all.

In our next post, we will turn our attention to the early church as we seek to understand what the church should be known for today.

What Does It Look Like To Be Missional?

In our last post, we examined the call of the church to bring the message of Christ to our culture and truly “incarnate Jesus” to a watching world. But in a practical sense, what does it look like for us to live out this “missional-incarnational” mandate that He has given us? Rather than hiding the seed of the gospel in our “barns” on Sunday mornings, how do we begin to sow these seeds in the world at large?

First, we must learn how to bring church to the streets. What would happen if we took the kingdom of God to where society lives and where life happens instead of keeping it cloistered in special buildings that few care to visit? To begin to embrace this missional mandate, many churches’ influence would increase simply by moving out of their buildings and instead meeting where people already are at! The church must increasingly find ways to infiltrate the culture at large, and this begins by first gathering together in society’s common meeting places. In so doing, we create “spiritual spaces” in the midst of everyday life: in coffeehouses, in bars, in parks, on football teams, in school cafeterias, and workplace lunchrooms.

I think of a church in California meeting in a parking lot at 3 a.m., attempting to reach out to the second shift workers whose schedules alienate them from present forms of church. I think of believers attempting to hang out in a coffee house that is frequented by occultists, spreading the light of Christ in a dark place. I think of a family that started a basketball ministry for junior high students in a city park, sharing games, a meal, and the message of Christ with those kids who attend. I think of a church music ministry who has opened recording studios in the community in an attempt to build bridges with local musicians. These all are efforts to move the church from a fringe Christian subculture to an integral part of the community at large.

But simply meeting in a new location doesn’t make a church missional. The church must also define success in ministry differently if we are to embody the missional example of Jesus. As one says, this means “getting a new scorecard.” The church must move beyond the mindset that measures ministry success by traditional markers such as buildings, dollars, and weekly attendance, and instead must embrace more missional benchmarks that gauge success by the transformation of the community outside the walls of the church. Better indicators of missional effectiveness and the health of a church body, for example, are hours spent praying for the community, the number of school children being tutored in after-school church programs, and hours spent by members with unbelievers. How often do community leaders call the church asking for advice? How many underserved people have been provided meals through the church’s efforts in a given month? Rather than counting the percentage of the church involved in small groups, should we not be considering the number of unbelievers in attendance each week as a better indicator of the body’s health? Until we “recalibrate the scorecard” in this manner to better evaluate our effectiveness, the traditional focus on money, numbers, and buildings as the benchmark of success will hamper our outreach efforts.

Finally, each member of today’s church must recognize the importance of their role in solving the “missional crisis” of the 21st century. It is incredibly easy to dismiss a discussion of missional living as mere ivory tower church strategy for pastors, irrelevant to the average Christian sitting in the pews. Yet once we come to grips with the fact that every Christian is called to be a church planter, these objections quickly fade. When confronted by the fact that most of our individual lives as believers are virtually devoid of missional impact, the church’s problem at large becomes our problem individually as well. When will each one of us begin to take our call to the fields of harvest seriously? It is incumbent upon all of us to respond individually to the missional deficit of our day. Clearly, if the church is to truly become missional in our day, a radical reworking of church as we know it is in order. It is up to each member of the Body of Christ today to take this mission seriously, to truly imitate Jesus by taking His good news to the streets. It is time for average, everyday followers of Jesus like you and I to realize our calling to the fields together. It is our time to become a radical church indeed.

The Missional-Incarnational Mandate

In our last post, we contrasted the prevalent model of attractional church with the missional mandate that Christ has bestowed upon His people. Many have better termed this model exemplified by Jesus the missional-incarnational model after His attempt to reach mankind through His incarnation. In His attempt to bring His message of love to us, God actually became one of us to meet us in the midst of our fallenness and sin. As Eugene Peterson paraphrases John 1:14 in The Message, “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.” At the incarnation, God chose to send not a representative to us, but came Himself in the form of a humble man, with “no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him” (Isaiah 53:2). In so doing, He demonstrated sincere affinity and identification with us in His attempt to draw us to Him.

It is this same missional-incarnational approach that we as the church must adopt in relation to our culture today. As Jesus said in John 20:21, “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.” Just as Christ stayed not at a distance but “moved into our neighborhood,” so we as His followers must incarnate Christ to a watching world by being directly and actively involved in the lives of those we seek to reach.

Yet too often, the church prefers to be sequestered and removed from our culture, believing that mission starts in the barns rather than the fields. We’ve built for ourselves some very nice barns we meet in on Sunday mornings, with their high quality sound systems, heated baptistries, and Disney inspired kids areas, but as Neil Cole points out, such an approach to evangelism is as foolish as the farmer who builds a barn and calls the crops to come in. God never intended for the seeds of His love to be stored in barns on Sunday mornings, but seeks for us to sow His message in the fields at large, dirtying our hands in the soil of those far from Him.

We all likely agree with these concepts, but have you and I both missed this call to the fields? Christ has commanded us to “go, and make disciples of all nations”, but has this missional mandate fallen on deaf ears? After his extensive polling of American Christians, George Barna reported that the typical American Christian will die without leading a single person to Christ in their lifetime. Sadly, I must completely agree with the validity of Barna’s conclusions as I look at my own life and the lives of other Christians I know. The fact is unarguable: without drastic changes in my life, I fear that this lack of fruit will be my fate and perhaps yours.
We must not postpone our obedience any longer. We must act, and quickly, if we are to be the “salt of the earth” as Christ has called us to be. He has called us to be agents of His grace, peace, and light to the world, the “sent ones” who change the landscape of our culture through the message of His love. By God’s grace, may we realize this noblest of callings our Leader has given us.

In our next post, we will explore what such a missional-incarnational approach might look like in our day.

Attractional vs. Missional church

In our last post, we explored the “crisis of relevance” the American church faces today in both attendance and influence. For the church to remedy these failures, what must our response be? Quite simply, the church’s age-old model of “attractional evangelism” must be exchanged for a more organic and Biblical model.
What is the attractional model of evangelism? As one might expect, the attractional model of church concentrates its evangelism efforts on trying to attract unbelievers to the church. Most pastors today spend their entire week wracking their brains, tweaking their sermons, and improving their programs in an attempt to make the church’s ministries attractive and relevant to those outside. Yet this attractional model is always built on the idea that if the church makes its services interesting enough and compelling enough, unbelievers will be drawn to Christ. The weakness in this approach, however, is that unbelievers must come to the church if they are to find Christ, a “bitter pill” that many are unwilling to swallow.
This attractional model that the church has long operated by must be replaced by a missional model if the church is to remedy its “crisis of relevance” today. The missional model simply attempts to take the good news of Jesus to the culture where people are at, rather than waiting for them to come to the church. A missional model of church, then, will often not take the traditionally recognizable form of a church with its Sunday morning service in a special building set aside for that purpose. Rather, it seeks ways to bring its community into the midst of those outside the church. The missional model often rejects the traditional Sunday morning expression of church as a service one goes to (witness the expression “go to church”), but believes the church to be a body that one experiences in the context of daily living.
In centuries past, the attractional model was quite adequate and effective, as church was the center of culture, church attendance was enforced by the state, and all were assumed Christian by birth. Yet in today’s multicultural and postmodern society, the effectiveness of this model has long since passed. The idea of “throwing a party and expecting the world to come to it,” an accurate summary of the attractional model, is fraught with difficulties today for several reasons.
First, the attractional model expects unbelievers to engage us on our turf and become one of us if they are to hear the message of the gospel. In fact, some have said that the attractional model might better be termed an extractional model, as new converts are expected to be uprooted from their existing lives to join a Christian subculture on Sundays. The attractional model requires those who would hear about Jesus to come to the church and engage us in our cultural zone if they are to follow Christ. For most unbelievers, such a proposition is very alienating to say the least. To expect those who “don’t like church” to come to Christ through such a model is folly in the highest degree. Should we not rather take the gospel to them rather than force them to come to us?
Second, the attractional model is not the New Testament model of evangelism. From Jesus to Paul to the early church, we see an active missional model embodied, with the good news being brought to those far from the Father in the midst of their cultural setting. From the church’s earliest beginnings, an active missional model was embodied and practiced as the early believers took the message of Jesus to the streets, engaging the culture on their turf and in their terms with the Gospel. Such a model was common even to the life of Jesus, who repeatedly crossed cultural barriers to take His Kingdom to tax collectors, prostitutes, Gentiles, and demoniacs, to name but a few. Most importantly, Jesus refused to assimilate these new followers into the Jewish subculture from which He came, but rather sent them back to their own people and culture to share what He had done in their lives.
Clearly, the “come and see” approach to evangelism that is so common in our day must be exchanged for a model more in line with that practiced by our Leader. In our next post, we will explore further what the example of Christ teaches us about what it truly means to be missional in our day and age.

The Failure of the American Church

There's no denying that the American church faces a crisis of relevance in this day and age. Currently, attendance at American churches today is rapidly dwindling. According to George Barna, the number of adults in American who no longer attend church has almost doubled since 1991, even though the adult population has grown 15% over that time. Adult church attendance in the USA is at only 18% and is dropping lower each year. By the year 2025, the church will have lost half of its market share in the United States. Clearly, interest in church these days isn’t what it used to be.
But why? Amid today’s culture with an unprecedented openness to spirituality, should our churches not be bursting at the seams with new attenders? Sure, some of our churches might be still be growing, but the vast majority of that growth today comes from transfers within our same Christian subculture rather than from new conversions. Why are so many interested in spirituality today, but so few are interested in attending church?
Dwindling attendance isn’t the only problem besetting the American church today. Despite the church’s best efforts, the cultural chasm between itself and contemporary culture grows larger with each passing year. Barna’s recent research shows that the major influencers of American culture today are law, music, movies, TV, internet, family, and books. Among the second tier of influencers, schools, peers, newspapers, radio, businesses appear. Consistently, surveys show the church appears among those institutions with little to no influence in today’s culture. It seems that the gap is growing larger between a godless culture and an insulated church who isn’t quite sure how to respond.
In the face of such a dire situation, the church instinctively responds by simply tinkering with the same model it’s always used; attempts are made to improve the sermon’s relevance, expand the children’s programs, rev up the worship band, and add more outreach events, for instance, in response to this dilemma. Yet in the face of its rapid decline in influence and a fluid, postmodern society, is simple tinkering on the old attractional, “come to us” model of church still the answer to our ills? Is more of the same still the answer, or is an entirely new paradigm of church needed in our day if we are to bridge the ever-enlarging gap between ourselves and the culture around us?
We will explore this answer in our next post.

COAH's Core Practices- Commitment to Unity

In Acts 2, we read the inspiring account of the early church’s community, which was characterized by regular fellowship, generous sharing, and “having all things in common.” Though today’s church longs to imitate this model of Christian unity, it is painfully evident that our experience of community falls dramatically short of this ideal. Though we may strive for it to be otherwise, the breakneck pace of our lives combined with our consumer mentality leaves true Christian community elusive and difficult to achieve in our day. What steps must be taken if we are to truly be unified together as one Body in Christ?

True Christian community must begin with a common commitment among all members to pursue Christ above all else. Too often, we depend on the Sunday service and the small group experience to be the driving force of our individual pursuit of Christ, when in reality the order should be reversed. Community does not precede discipleship in the Biblical model; rather, the pursuit of Christ on the part of each member must occur first for true unity to occur. As 1 John 1:7 says, “If we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.” For true Christian community to be a reality in our day, then, we at COAH must pursue authentic discipleship first and foremost, recognizing that such unity will naturally follow. If every member does not commit to living out our other core practices, we should not be surprised if we find unity difficult to achieve. For only when each member is individually pursuing Jesus first on their own will we be truly unified together.

Nor can unity be achieved without risk being assumed by the members of the body. Though certainly the early church’s experience of unity in Acts was blissful, awe-filled and joyful, we read immediately afterward of the hardships faced by many of its members: imprisonment, martyrdom, and persecution, to name a few. Though these may not be the risks for the average American Christian, we too can expect to face opposition and risk if we are to truly pursue unity together. For unity to truly be realized, we must be willing to be open about our struggles with others, possibly risking our reputation in their eyes. If we are to be unified together, we must not hesitate in carrying the emotional and spiritual burdens of others, realizing that such burdens may be difficult for us to bear. Above all, we will not become a unified community through a formal small group initiative handed down to us by church leadership; rather, unity will only realized when it emerges organically, as a grass-roots movement initiated by the rank and file of the church. To this end, each of us must take proactive steps to begin and cultivate open, honest, and vulnerable spiritual friendships with one another. For if we are all priests and ministers of the Most High, all of us must embrace our authority and responsibility to create relationships such as these, and in so doing become church planters in the fullest sense of the term.

Above all other callings, this is the calling that our Leader has given us: to be unified together as one Body, and in so doing to truly incarnate Christ among us. For as we are unified together as living stones, forming one Temple together, it is our prayer that God’s glory may be seen among us. Just as in the days of Solomon of old, may it be said that His Shekinah glory has filled His temple as we dwell in unity together.

COAH's Core Practices- Commitment to Solitude

All believers would agree that any God-honoring church should hold the discipline of prayer in high regard. Yet without mutual accountability to one another or common commitments to this practice among a church’s members, prayer will inevitably fall to the wayside. In our fast-paced American lifestyles, the “prayer life” of many Christians today is limited to merely talking at God, quickly offering requests and petitions to Him on the run, in the car, or in times of stress, but allowing little to no time for letting God speak reciprocally to us or actually converse with us. Try as we might to practice ceaseless prayer in our lives, regular periods of solitude with God seem to elude our grasp. Our souls need regular times of two way conversation with God, not just talking at him, but talking with him; listening to His promptings, receiving His love, and learning how to hear his voice. Yet so often, it seems easier to "pray on the run" than it is to slow down, remove our addiction to speed and productivity, and open ourselves to the still, small, and direct voice of God to our vulnerable and fragile souls.

Yet Christ’s model was one of regular solitude, withdrawing himself from his ministry to both converse with and commune with His Father. On many occasions we see Jesus after a day of ministry “withdrawing to a solitary place”, spending all night in His Father’s presence. If the Creator and Redeemer of the world practiced such regular solitude and lived his whole life in dependence on the Father's voice and power, how much more should we as His followers do the same!

In an attempt to imitate our Leader in this way, we as members of COAH embrace a intentional pursuit of solitude in our lives. Each of us commits ourselves to regular times of stillness before God, allowing opportunity to not only speak to God, but to be spoken to by Him as well. We agree that we will be accountable to one another to practice this discipline on a weekly basis . We realize that such a pursuit might have different forms for all of us: journaling, listening to music, oral prayer, reading Scripture, or simply resting in His presence, to name a few. In these times of solitude, we will give our souls opportunity to receive His love, recognizing that it is only when we have directly experienced His love ourselves will we be motivated and empowered to share that same love with others. With God's help, may we be known as such a community.