Falling In Love With Her All Over Again

I admit that I had grown to hate her, at least what she had become. She got to where she was kind of a bitch to anybody and everybody who wasn’t like her. Oh, she was nice to their face, and would even go out of her way to be seen helping them now and then, but she did not like them. She thought they were dirty, and she wanted to keep her hands clean.

She used people. She raped people. All she cared about was how she could use their gifts and talents and cash to build big, flashy homes where she could host “Let’s Talk About How Right We Are And How Wrong Everyone Else Is And Pretend We Care” parties for her friends.

The Community & the Kingdom

I disagree with the way a lot of churches I know and have been connected with in the past define “evangelism.” For example, I was at a leadership/church planning retreat with a church where I was “on staff.” We had decided to break the group into groups of 4 or 5 people, give each group $25 in cash and an hour and a half to go out into the area where the retreat was being held with the instruction to perform random acts of kindness.

When the groups returned, and each gave their highlights of the random acts, one theme dominated: the church. The acts of kindness hadn’t been random at all, and the acts weren’t done to show “kindness” either. All the groups had done was target potential church members and use the cash and the act of kindness as a gimmick to hook people. Every group, without exception, had approached a “low-income” (or “no-income”) man or woman, bought ‘em a burger (or something similar) and sat ‘em down for a good long talk about our church and what an incredible church it was.

Yet another adventure in completely missing the point, if you ask me.

Missional Community

“Authentic community” has been the catch phrase in progressive, somewhat “emergent” churches for a few years now, and I believe in it. Some friends of mine attend the Journey at Ecclesia here in Nashville, and they define their community as “villages.” On Sunday’s, all of the villages come together to worship, but “church” happens in the villages, during the week. I love that. I want that for Emmaus.

Back to this authentic community thing… It seems to me that the most recent modus operandi of the church, “authentic community,” is being replaced with a new approach, “missional community.” From what I can tell, missional community is about “blurring the lines between us (Christians) and them (non-Christians).” Last year I heard Don Miller and Rick McKinley (two of my favorite believers) talk about how at Rick’s church, Imago Dei, “you can’t really just assume the person you are sitting next to is a Christian.” And I just read a quote from Erwin McManus, pastor of Mosaic in L.A., in which he stated that atheists were in the majority at the Mosaic campus that meets in the Mayan theater.

I love that there is community happening with people who love and follow Jesus and people who don’t. But are the lines supposed to get “blurred?” What about 2 Corinthians 6?

What if…

What if you could start over and re-design church from the ground up, what would you do?

I just started reading Jim & Casper Go To Church by Jim Henderson, and I must say, it is a really great read. In it, Jim says that to believe that Christianity is in the religion business is to believe a lie, that “What Jesus talked about looked a lot like Habitat for Humanity or Alcoholics Anonymous – a grassroots movement with no official hierarchy but lots of leaders, no offerings but enough money to get the job done.”

I’m right in the middle of an attempt to fulfill a calling to build a community of Kingdom adventurers, and I have to say it’s much harder than I ever anticipated… I’m finding that I don’t even know where to start. God has been so real, and the Kingdom has literally come alive to me in this process, but I’m shocked at how quickly I’ve started to settle into the routine of sing, preach, pray. This Sunday, we’re going to figure some things out if it kills us!