The Relational Mission

I grew up on a farm in north Texas. We grew things like wheat, oats, and maize. But primarily we raised hay that we sold to horse ranches. Now horses have a quite delicate digestive system. They are not like cows who can eat almost any kind of hay, even hay that has tons of weeds or even that which is full of mold. Cows can do this because they have a stomach with four compartments which allows them to digest and re-digest food before it enters into their system. Horses don't have stomachs like that. So when they eat weeds or mold, they get sick. On the farm, growth is natural. It's going to occur, even if you don't do anything to a field. But growth for growth's sake is a farmer's enemy. Weeds grow much faster than grass. Because we were raising hay to feed to horses, we had to pay attention to what we were we growing, not just the fact that we were growing it. In other words, we could not fall into the trap that growth automatically meant health. This is t...

"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness for they will be filled."—Matt 5:6 This beatitude reminds me of when our kids come to us and simple say "Hungry!" To which we have to respond, please ask, "Can I have a snack please?" However their raw expression speaks to the rudimentary nature of what Jesus is saying. We don't have to train our kids to realize that they are hungry. It's part of who they are. And when they are hungry, they want to be filled or they get very cranky. Before getting into what this beatitude actually means, I have to be honest about what I've heard preachers say that it means for most of my life. "Blessed are those who do right things." Or "Blessed are those who live a moral life." Or for the more fundamentalistic sermons, "Blessed are those who line up (that is attend church faithfully, pay their tithes, and volunteer for ministry)." But that is not what this beatitud...

When people talk about "missional community," the first thing you had better do is ask what they mean. Some use this as a label to describe task groups that are reaching out and ministering to a specific group of people or location. Others use it to refer to a group of 20-50 people, a mid-sized group, that has a mission beyond just living in community; in other words it refers to a specific structure. Reggie McNeal uses these words to describe what he calls a "post-congregational" church experience, which basically means that the coming of the missional community experience marks a shift from a centralized, building-centered church to a scattered one. While these description of missional community can be helpful for church leaders to understand their purpose and structure, I've not found them to be that compelling when talking with grass-roots people. That is, the regular people in the church who want to see God move through and even those  who do not attend a...

A while back, I wrote a series of post entitled Why Small Groups Fail in America. Here I'd like to offer 6 reasons why small groups don't fail. Or Why Small Groups Work. Reason #1: Pastors refrain from "fad hopping." There is no trick to making small groups work. There is no magical structure out there that will make groups work better than all the other structures. For some reason, over the past 20 years there have been a slew of different models and approaches offered that try and convince us that they have a new and improved approach. But the reality is that jumping from strategy to strategy actually distracts people. There are a lot of "right ways" to do small groups. And there is no one "right way". Figure out your right way and stick with it. Reason #2: The senior pastor carries the vision for small groups. If this is not the case, then the best you can hope for is a small group program, not the development of community on mission that sh...

In the mid-1990s, I relocated to Vancouver, B.C. to study with Gordon Fee so that I could develop the exegetical skills and a background in first century history in order to effectively teach and write about the nature and practices of the first century church. Well, I've yet to write that book, but I become well-versed in the best titles available on the subject. In the exploration of the vast number of titles, I've found that most of the more accessible resources—some of which have become popular—have an "ax to grind." In other words, they grab hold of one or two aspects of historical research that supports the kind of church they want to see manifest today and they limit their presentation of the data on the first century church in such a way that it supports their preferred model of church life. For example, those who advocate for the house church model find all kinds of support for the house church and therefore determine that the house church is the intended u...

In the sitcom The Soul Man starring Cedric the Entertainer, Cedric's character, Reverend Sherman, is a new pastor who was a former singing artist. After his father retires as the pastor of a local congregation and he assumes the role, he is questioning his ability to be a pastor. His father tells him, "Preachers are basically rock stars for the Lord." I know that most of us would never make such a crass statement about a pastor. Most pastors I know have entered the ministry because they want to serve God and love people. Most have put in years of hard work, sacrificed much and worked for must less than we could in earn in other jobs. However, it does seem that we elevate the role of senior pastor to a status that calls for questioning. As I've meditated on Jesus' words "Blessed are the meek," I've realized that being meek is about having the freedom to be oneself, without pretension. It's about having the freedom to live out one's iden...

The path to meekness which involves hearing God’s words of love for us often starts with our own voice. We must begin with what we have in our heart and learn to express it to God. ( See previous post on meekness for more about hearing God's words "My Beloved .") We must learn to express our true voice, even when what what lies within us falls short of what we think it should be. Let's call it "dialogical praying" the kind that reveals all of who we are, without the need to pretend to be different than we are. It grants us the freedom from having to get prayer “right.” It allows us to actually be the beloved to the point of being honest with ourselves and with God and foregoing any need to pray according to some kind of plan or formula. For some, expressing their true voice is not a big challenge. I have encountered a few who freely expressed themselves to God no matter their circumstances. Whether out of a sense of desperation or because that have a great...

Church done from a programmatic point of view can look good, all the while there is something that lies beneath that falls short of the veneer. But church done in community, or a relational way is messy. It won't look as good on the outside, but from my experience, discipleship is much more likely to occur. This short video speaks to my experience with moving from a church of veneer to church done in a relational way. What motivates you to invest in the relational way of church? I call it "the relational way" because so many small group systems have been developed that are just another version of a church veneer.

When it comes to options for how to organize your small group system, there are many. In my book How Do We Get There from Here? I identify four key questions which differentiate the strategies from one another. These are four questions you can ask about the different approaches to see how they are distinct. These questions are: What is the purpose of the small group? How are small group leaders supported? What priority is given to small group life as compared to other activities in the church? How does the church equip small group members and raise up new small group leaders? In that book, I use these four questions to analyze ten different strategies, including the cell church model (which I call the Cho/Neighbour Model), Groups of 12, the Purpose-Driven model, and others). Here's a quick list of the major strategies: The On-going Open Group Strategy (See Small Groups Big Impact by Jim Egli) The Semester Sermon Study Strategy (See Sticky Church by Larry Osborne) T...

Every church has a culture, a way of life that defines how things are done and not done. A culture dictates those unspoken norms that no one even knows how to talk about. It’s just the way things are. Just as a fish cannot explain what water is like because the water is the world of the fish, so the culture of a local congregation is the world of that congregation. So what happens when leaders discover that they need to change the culture of their church? What happens when leaders have their eyes opened to the fact that their congregation is falling short of being on mission with God? What do leaders do in order to reshape the culture so that they can be more than a church that happens to do “missional” things and actually become a new kind of “missional” culture ? Well, first  start with JR Woodward’s book Creating a Missional Culture . This a a great introduction to how culture works within a church setting. JR provides helpful handles that help you get beneath the surface ...

In June, my new book Difference Makers is released. This is a book that aims at the person in the pew who is asking the question of how his or her life can make a difference. While I was writing this book for individuals, an ongoing subtext was how we as difference-making individuals participate in the people of God, the church, which is called to be a difference-making society. The question for us is How then do we make a difference? The church is much more than just a group of individuals who make a difference on their own. We need to have an imagination that sees the church as a soceity. In Stanley Hauerwas' commentary on Matthew he writes about the church in his introductory reflections on the Sermon on the Mount. He called the people of God a "society." I like this word because it pulls back the curtains on what the church is called to be, something much more than an institution that provides religious meetings once per week. It helps us to see how Jesus was and...

Being a follower of Jesus means meekness will be a byproduct of our relationship with Jesus. However, it seems that we have defined Jesus followership today in such a way that we can avoid meekness. As a result, we miss out on the life that Jesus wants to give us as we fall short of the character the Spirit is weaving into the world. How then do we participate in meekness? Or put another way, how do we make room for the meekness of Jesus in our lives? I think part of the answer lies in being true in the way we pray, as opposed to praying in ways that might be called perfunctory or inauthentic. When we are true and truthful before God, we are freed to hear God's voice of love for us. This frees us to participate in meekness. Henri Nouwen spent a lifetime praying and writing about prayer. He was a Catholic priest and taught theology at Notre Dame, Yale and Harvard. Then for the last season of his life, he was the pastor at l’Arche Daybreak in Toronto, Canada which was a commu...

About a year ago I was in the middle of writing a blog series entitled "Is Both/And Possible?" In these posts, I was proposing the idea that most churches need to think in terms of two kinds of groups, both connecting small groups and missional communities, primarily because most people are not ready to jump immediately into the missional experience; they need preparation. Most resources available speak to these two experiences in exclusive terms. For a quick look at the previous posts in this series, click here . I needed to take a break from writing this series because I needed to do further research and test out my convictions. Now, I'm more convinced than ever that most Western churches need to think in terms of both/and not either/or. Because various writers have defined the terms "small groups" and "missional communities" to refer to specific structures, I need adopt some new language. For instance, the small group experience is most often...

I'm reading A Life Together by Seraphim Sigrist, a Bishop in the Orthodox Church who learned what it meant to follow Jesus in underground home churches in the former Soviet Union. This little book is a gem with a message forged under great pressure and resistance. In the introduction he writes: "Now, if the gift of ourselves and the ability to stand on our own feet is a first discovery in community, I would add a second discovery and gift found in community. Our continuing agreement to share life together opens out into deeper and deeper oneness with the others of our community. We live into a friendship in a full sense that Jesus spoke of when he said, 'From now on I call you friends.'      Community is an ongoing entering into friendship, for the mystery of community is that of friends, and the giving of our lives for our friends. This friendship is the ongoing gift of the ever deeper realization of the law of sharing and exchange, living Jesus' command to ...

Recently, I've been seeking direction related to aspects of my writing. As I was praying, I was impressed with the words "Trust your heart." The actions that these words pointed to were clear and logically those actions made  sense. However, the words "Trust your heart," prompted two things in my head. First, "The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?" (Jer. 17:9). And second, the song "Listen to Your Heart" by Roxette from the 1980s. Since what I felt in prayer sounded more like Roxette's song than this verse from Jeremiah, I realized I needed to work this out in my mind. For the sake of clarity on this subject of listening to our hearts, think about it in terms of hearing God's will regarding one's vocation. There seems to be two extremes on a spectrum of thought. The first begins with the doctrine of universal sin, which in it's most basic form means that man is unable to enter into a...