Preaching to Unbelief

Preaching to Unbelief (PTU) is different to Preaching to Belief (PTB). Here's a few of the differences:

1. PTB is to confirm what Christians already know so we feel affirmed in our belief system. PTU is to raise questions about the dilemmas of life.
2. PTB protects us from the world. Sundays fill us with resolve to withstand the world's evil. PTU calls us to engage the world, looking for the ways God is entering into the world.
3. PTB begins with statements. PTU begins with questions.

Just a few ideas to throw out. Give me yours as I explore this topic.

A Road Not Traveled

My wife and I have the opportunity to travel widely across the country, observing, listening to and engaging in conversation with the fellowship of the churches of Christ. As we do this I keep a travel log of what we are learning. Recently I was blessed to share with our local preachers what God has been doing through Kairos. Since many of these men are my “traveling companions in the kingdom” I wanted to share with them some of what I have been learning about our fellowship. The following is a condensed version of those thoughts. I pray these considerations will encourage and challenge you as you serve God in his great kingdom.

1. Our heritage is blessed by a powerful “believers church” theology that, in its strength, is not complacent with the world as it is. For church planting, it is this theological heritage that critiques pragmatism or personal preference as the foundations for decision making about what a church planter will do. Our believers’ church heritage should help us live out God’s desires in the midst of the fiercely opposing values of a world where the “prince of this world” rules hard. Leonard Allen in Things Unseen describes the essence of a believers’ church theology as an apocalyptic vision of the kingdom of God of which we are both recipients and outposts; this apocalyptic vision provides the dynamic that energizes us into service to the world.

2. Our fellowship is blessed by a deep desire to obey, rooted in a trust in God’s Word. When this desire to obey is based on relationship, knowing God--we do well; when this desire to obey is interpreted as being knowledgeable of the Word, disconnected from relationship with a personal God, we lapse into law-keeping which turns us brittle and harsh.

3. The Road Not Traveled – This is the title of the final chapter in John Mark Hick’s Kingdom Come, the story of James Harding, David Lipscomb and the Nashville Bible School. Our fellowship, and probably God’s people in general, tend to do better when we are traveling folk and not settlers. Our call is still the call of Abraham to leave Ur and of Moses to leave Egypt so that we can experience God as we travel with him. Working with John Mark’s theme, here are three areas that for me constitute the road our fellowship in our generation has yet to travel:

a. Reducing our pride and arrogance. Our spirit of debate and insistence on our correctness are signs. Our well-honed ability to critique, evaluate and look for fault is another. The most damaging evidence of this sin is our struggle with spiritual submission to those whom God brings with spiritual authority into our lives. I confess, I am truly a child of my heritage—I feel I can do better then “they can.” So I have the right to tweak, adjust, dissent. But honestly, I can’t do better. I’m doing the best I can. Lord enrich my willingness to be blessed by others.

b. Serving the world as part of the fellowship of the broken. Our strong “set apart” exclusivity has not only separated us from other believers’ traditions, it has often separated us from the world God intends for us to serve. If we are to be salt and light among God’s lost people we will gain the opportunity to be heard as we recognize that we too are members of the fellowship of the broken. It is this personal recognition that will raise our level of compassion out of the pew and into a life of transforming service in God’s world.

c. Developing a culture of generosity at the level of the congregation. My experience is that as individuals our fellowship can be generous—at times. This has seldom been my experience at the congregational level. A friend of mine recently made this observation of us, “When missionaries go to churches of my fellowship if they do not ask for big money, the churches are insulted. When missionaries go to churches of Christ your churches are insulted if they are asked for money.” Giving without expecting the benefit of the gift must truly be the definition of generous giving. My experiences suggest that generous giving is a road our churches have yet to travel.

I just wanted to share these thoughts with you as we learn together how to minister from our fellowship, calling one another to God’s mission among God’s lost people.

God bless you all for your contributions to the kingdom.

Stan Granberg

Kairos executive director

Coaching

Hello everyone,

Pray the holiday season will be comforting and enjoyable.

One of the active systems that we use to support church plants is coaching. We're familiar with coaching in a sports context, but in a church context it's a bit strange to us, so I thought a short bit of background might be helpful.

For the past 5 years we’ve been delving into the church planting systems that have grown up in the US. In the 1980s starting a new church changed from the home based, mom & pop with the kids in the living room to a more public arena activity. It was a rugged activity and failure rates were in the 80% range.

Out of the desire to see the kingdom grow and to minimize the spiritual damage of failed plants, Bob Logan, Steve Ogne, Aubrey Malphurs and others began to explore systems that would reduce some of the risk. The three central systems that have become the heart of a planned approach to church planting are: 1) assessment, 2) training and 3) coaching. The first two are no strangers to us in the foreign missions context. The coaching, however, has not been part of our support agenda. We’ve felt like the sponsoring, supporting churches handled that. We mis-fired on that assumption.

Since 2000 the systems approach to planting churches in the US has grown into a marketable industry. The New Church Conference in Orlando, for example, was an in-house event for Christian Churches just 5 years ago with about 200 people attending. Last year there were 1,800 people from every spectrum of Christianity attending. The systems approach has also turned around the survival rate from 80% failure to 80% success at year 3 (Stetzer, Church Plant Survivability and Health Survey, 2007).

Our experience with Kairos is that the coaching is both the glue that keeps church planters functioning and the edge that helps them be more effective. Our journey into coaching is still fairly young, but we’ve learned a few key ideas.

1) Coaching for a church plant, or for a mission work, is more directed than life coaching. We speak of “coaching towards.”

2) To learn to coach well is a long term growth process, best done by being coached while coaching others.

3) Coaching is a tool that is really cutting away the stubborn, isolationist, “I can do it myself and don’t need anyone else” mentality that I have experienced (and promoted at times) in our fellowship. We our thoroughly enjoying the highly networked, interconnected relationships that our coaching system is developing among the church planters with whom Kairos is working.

Last month we invited MRN to join us for a seminar with Gary Rohrmayer, national church planting director for the Baptist General Conference, at what we called our “Making a Movement Seminar” for the Kairos leadership team and our sponsoring church. Gary challenged us to not only develop our systems (we are developing 10 clearly identified systems), but to be deliberate in infusing all of them with spiritual dynamics.

We’re not claiming expertise with coaching, whatever expertise we have comes from the fact we may be just a few steps further down the path. Nor are we promoting Kairos as a “coaching certification” organization. I do think we have some good insights and experiences to share and we are really keen on deepening our partnership with others.

Blessings,

Stan

Church Generations

Quite often I am asked why don't we work with existing churches that are declining, or at least encourage church planters to move into these churches rather than start something new from scratch. Here’s some short answers to this question that I wrote recently.

Some general ideas and observations:

• Churches tend to have a generational lifespan, i.e., most will live for the lifetime of those that started them, when that generation passes away, typically so will their churches (I’m talking sociologically with the “their” pronoun).
• The churches each generation starts exists to take care of the spiritual needs of that generation and is endowed with their generational DNA. When younger generations express feelings like they don’t fit, they are saying that the church isn’t of their generation, it’s of their grandparents and parents’ generation. This idea is a sometimes difficult for those in our fellowship to grasp since we view the church through ahistorical lenses.
• -Unless churches have a strong revitalization that changes their basic foundation to a new generation, they will not survive much beyond 50-70 years.
• Statistically, only 5% of churches that reach the stage of decline, and even long-term plateaued growth, will successfully revitalize into an actively growing church again.
• David T. Olsen’s (www.theamericanchurch.org) research on the American church scene found that from 1990 to 2004 the established, already existing churches in America added 0% to the growth of Christianity in America. Church plants added 7%, the only growth that occurred.
• The issue with what is now the majority of our churches in Churches of Christ is not theological, it is sociological. We developed and spread as a southern, rural oriented fellowship. Our country is now urban. The farmlands of America are generally depopulated now compared to what they were 50 years ago.
• As a fellowship we are still wrestling to learn how to live and thrive in urban environments, though we’ve made progress in suburban environments.

Some observations from my personal experiences:

• I’ve worked long and deeply with 4 churches that would be similar to those you have in mind. None of them have been able to respond effectively to the changes they needed to make in order to become a vital, growing church again. The issue is primarily one of DNA identity. Those members still at church are closely connected to, or they are of the founding generation. To make more the minor, incremental changes makes them “feel” that the church is changing, which is exactly the point. They become resistant on theological grounds because they do not know how to deal with the change process emotionally.
• Almost all of the resources that we have available in Churches of Christ (lectureships, seminars, colleges and universities, missional church resources, elder link, print media, etc., etc.) are produced and designed to minister to already existing churches, all of those churches that we see around us. On a percentage of resources we have 0% of our resources focused on developing the next generation of churches that will serve the younger, urban people we see all around us. Kairos is one of only 2 church planting ministries in all the Churches of Christ who are desperately trying to help our fellowship face the future through a new generation of churches.
• We have often spoken of a “generation” gap between those below 30 or 40 and those above. It is more appropriate to speak of this as a “culture” gap. The difference between these age groups is far larger, much more dramatic than a generational difference. In historical terms, those above 40 are the product of the printing press while those below are the product of the internet. These two generations process information differently, they perceive the world differently, they ask fundamentally different questions. For example, while those above 40 have typically asked “what is truth?” those below 40 ask “what works in life?”
• Existing churches minister best to existing Christians while new churches minister best to new Christians.
  
• As you stated, many churches are in states of decline because the predispositions they work from have taken them to that point.

So here’s the bottom line as I have experienced it, you’re correct, to work with an existing church will take lots of time and lots of effort. Will it produce results? The statistical odds are only 5% that you will see any appreciable, lasting results for long term health and growth of any church you select to work with. Certainly any work you do will help people feel loved and appreciated, and in that way it will feel good. During the 10 years I was at Cascade College I agonized deeply with how best to serve our existing churches and worked hard at it. The conclusion I came to, which is part of how God led us to our present ministry with Kairos, is that the best thing I can do for our existing churches is to help them see new healthy, growing churches and so find hope that we can make a difference for Jesus again in America.

Hope these thoughts give some further ideas to help you.

Blessings,

Stan

Answers to some questions

Recently I have been asked to answer some questions about church planting and Kairos. I thought the blog would be a way to interact with these questions in a more public venue.

What insights have you gained and/or lessons have you learned on church planting in the United States?

1. There is a new receptivity developing in at least parts of the US. The west coast, for example, is an amazing area of new church planting activity. We are finding people open for spiritual conversations. It does take them time to develop faith. The concept of believing in God is not familiar to them. They often ease into the idea that they are believers.

2. The most effective church planting groups in the US (Baptist General Conference, FourSquare, Vineyard, Evangelical Covenant, Southern Baptist) have:

a. Developed systems for assessing potential planters, training and coaching planters and funding the new churches for the first 3 to 5 years. They do not tend to work ad hoc or as isolated entities (i.e., an individual church learning everything from scratch).

b. A culture of expectation. As these groups have become more practiced, they have developed a culture of expectation and success towards church planting. Starting new churches becomes the norm, not the exception, and they expect that most of them will do well. I am amazed at the consistently positive response we receive from these groups. They are encouraging; they want to see our planters succeed. They are willing to share resources.

3. Our fellowship has a lot of men and women who are ready to plant, but they want and need help. The task is too daunting for most of them to leave established ministries and jobs without having others walk alongside them. A ministry like Kairos provides such an impetus as well encouragement and confidence that lets them make the decision.

4. Potential planters in our fellowship often do not have a background in evangelism, very few of them have experience in growing, healthy churches and virtually none of them have experience in a recently planted church (5 yrs. old or less). This means we have a lot of training, expectation building and reorientation of ministry that we help planters develop.

5. How little our fellowship knows about or understands church planting today. Our primary reference for a model goes back to the 1960s and “living room” based church plants. Typically there were a few members of Churches of Christ in a location. Someone opened up their home for the gathering. Other members moved in, joined, and Bible studies (“cottage” meetings, Jule Miller filmstrips, etc.) where conducted with friends and neighbors. Most church members we talk with now perceive church planting as either a church split or an existing church must “hive” off 50 or 75 members to another location. We need other models to work from.

Today the 1960s pattern is seldom effective, vis a vis the “stateside mission” church that grows to 35 or 50 members and plateaus, requiring continued external assistance for many years in order to survive. Our culture is now suspicious of Christianity and much faith-based activity. To plant new churches that can become self-supporting in 4 or 5 years and vitally influence the unchurched community in our new context requires more intentional effort and comprehension than the living room model provides.

The Damascus Road Call

Acts 9:1-19, the call of Paul on the road to Damascus. It is interesting how this most extraordinary and demanding call is the one we think of most often when we think of a call from God. The fact is, however, that God seems to use this type of calling quite seldom, and with good reason.

What comprises a Damascus Road call? First, it involves an intense, often supernatural experience. It is the call of Isaiah (chapter 6), Jeremiah (1:4-19), Elisha (2 Kings 2:9-12) and Moses (Exodus 3), where God meets people in remarkable ways, ways that leave them changed—transformed. Certainly Charleton Heston’s transformation on Mt. Sinai in the Ten Commandments is theatrically contrived, but it captures the essence of the transformation of the Damascus Road Call.

Second, the Damascus Road Call carries God’s intent for that person from the very beginnings of their life, if not before. Paul speaks of his call as having been designated for him from birth (Galatians 1:15). Jeremiah’s poetic revelation from God says:

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,

Before you were born I set you apart;

I appointed you as a prophet to the nations (Jeremiah 1:5)

And then there is Moses’ miraculous salvation from the wrath and hubris of the pharaoh of Egypt, only to end up a protected member of the royal family (Exodus 2:1-10).

The third characteristic of the Damascus Road Call is that there is a clearly identified purpose, often delivered by a spoken message from God. Again, each of the above individuals demonstrates this. Jeremiah, for example, receives a vision that describes the intent of God’s message as well as God’s verbal proclamation that prefigures the content of Jeremiah’s prophetic message to Judah (Jeremiah 1:15-16).

The fourth characteristic of the Damascus Road Call is that God uniquely prepares the individual he calls for the specific task for which he has called that person. When Moses was drawn from the Nile River even most kings and princes of the world could neither read nor write. Yet Moses, educated in Pharaoh’s palace, received the highest education the world at that time had to offer. God used Moses’ education to begin the writing of his personal revelation (the Bible) through Moses’ hand (Exodus 17:14; Mark 12:26). Paul’s personal heritage and background also came into play in his ministry. When Paul and Silas were falsely arrested and beaten in Acts 16, the Philippian magistrates feared reprisal for punishing a Roman citizen without trial which changed the tenor of response towards the fledgling Philippian church (Acts 16:37). Again under arrest in Jerusalem, this time by his own Jewish people, Paul used his background as a Pharisee to throw the Sanhedrin council into an uproar, setting Pharisee against Sadducee over the fact or fiction of the resurrection of the dead (Acts 23:6).

The final characteristic of the Damascus Road Call is that it demands from its recipients all they can give—and more. Paul describes his personal experiences of beatings, floggings, hunger, cold and shipwrecks in 2 Corinthians 11:23-28. The Hebrews writer provide his graphic, summative commentary this way, They were stoned; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated—the world was not worthy of them (11:37-38). Besides being the most extraordinary of calls, the Damascus Road Call is also the most demanding.

So why is the Damascus Road Call the one we gravitate to most quickly? Who in their right minds would want to receive this kind of call if it is so costly? A few reasons come to mind as I reflect on what people have told me. The most common reason seems to be that we want an absolute certainty that what we are doing is what God wants us to do. We feel unprepared or inadequate to make the decision facing us, so it would just be easier if God made the decision instead. Another reason people may gravitate towards this call is they do not know any other type of call exists. The Damascus Road Call is the default. And finally, some people feel like there must be some amazing glory to be had in the Damascus Road Call. Perhaps there is a recognition or reward for the “the few, the proud” that others will not receive. Perhaps. But more often than not those whom God has called in the stark, drastic event of the Damascus Road Call have been called to drink from a cup of sacrifice rather than a cup of glory (Matthew 20:22-23).

I don’t want to discourage us from pursuing a Damascus Road Call. God uses Damascus Road experiences because he has important, kingdom tasks to be done. To refuse such a call exacts even more of a price than one pays accepting the call. But for most of God’s people, thankfully, there are other ways that God calls that are just as valid, but easier to bear.

Next thoughts: the Exposure Call

The Call

“Timothy, my son, I give you this instruction in keeping with the prophecies once made about you, so that by following them you may fight the good fight” (1 Tim. 1:18).

Wouldn’t you like to be able to slip deeper into Paul’s mind, and Timothy’s, to gather more information about what Paul was saying.? Paul merely tantalizes us with these words, but for Timothy, they must have been both electric and comforting. Timothy had a deep purpose from God for his ministry, a purpose that had been clarified through prophetic utterance and energized through spiritual gifting from his mentor (1 Tim. 4:14; 2 Tim. 1:6). In the concise parlance of today’s religious world, we would say these statements refer to Timothy’s call.

Calling is an important concept in the church planting context. Studies by the Assemblies and Vineyard planting ministries revealed that for those church plants which failed, 90% and 50% of the planters, respectively, felt uncertain about their call to plant a new church. From experience, it is the certainty of the call that kept me going through some truly dark times on the mission field. The call in the life of a church planter is important.

In my fellowship of churches of Christ the vocabulary of call is not well known or well used. It leaves many of our planters wondering: “Did I get a call?” “What happens when I receive a call?” “Will God just tell me where to go and what to do?” These are all great questions. For the next few blogs I want to share my experiences with the calling of God as I have seen them in mission field contexts, both foreign and domestic.

3 Types of Calls

I’ve seen three general types of calls in my life and the lives of many friends and acquaintances. Here’s the taxonomy of calls I’ve developed from these experiences and from the biblical text:

1. The Damascus Road Call

2. The Exposure Call

3. The Consideration Call

Next blog: The Damascus Road Call