3DM Spring Webinar Menu

• FEBRUARY

Integrating family + ministry life. Many church leaders devote themselves to the life of the church, finding that it can take a heavy toll on the life of their family. Living an integrated life as a family on mission is the key. In this webinar, Sally Breen will share the lessons she’s learned on how to do this effectively for both the health of your family and the health of your church.

Thurs 2/16 3-4pm EST — Sally Breen

http://familylifewebinar.eventbrite.com/

How to use the Bible in the missional church. One of the common criticisms of missional churches is that they are heavy on mission and low on biblical literacy. It doesn’t have to be that way. In this webinar, Mike Breen will lay out the ways in which he has used scripture to shape the missional churches he has led as well as the practical methods he’s used to teach people to engage scripture in their own daily lives.

Mon 2/20 3-4pm EST — Mike Breen

http://bibleinmissionalchurchwebinar.eventbrite.com/

•  MARCH

How to turn half-hearted teens into missional ninjas. Most youth pastors we meet want to start a movement. The truth is you can, but you can’t do it aside from discipling people they way that Jesus did. He started the greatest movemental force in the history of the world and we’ve found that it might even work best with teens and young adults. This webinar is about how you can make that a reality with the teens in your church.

Thu 3/8 3-4pm EST — Dave Rhodes

http://disciplingteenswebinar.eventbrite.com/

Beyond staying together: Enjoying being together — lessons learned in a 30-year marriage. While exact numbers may vary, most research suggests that the divorce rate inside the church mirrors that among non-Christians. And for those in church leadership, the toll of ministry of marital life is a common lament. Mike and Sally’s marriage stands in opposition to that trend — and in this webinar they’ll share lessons they have learned on how to invest in their marriage and the kingdom at the same time.

Thu 3/15 5-6pm EST — Mike & Sally Breen

http://marriageonmissionwebinar.eventbrite.com/

How to start and multiply missional communities. For all the talk on theory behind missional communities, the question we hear asked most often is HOW.  This webinar is about how to start, grow, disciple people within and multiply missional communities. In it, Doug Paul will build on the 3DM field guide, offering ideas and insight, as well as answering questions on missional community strategy.

Tue 3/20 2:30-3:30pm EST — Doug Paul

http://missionalcommunitieswebinar.eventbrite.com/

How to start your first huddle. Huddles are fantastic vehicles for discipleship and we meet many people who are enthusiastic about using them to disciple leaders in their own context. Yet it can be daunting to start and lead something you have limited experience with yourself. In this webinar, Eric Pfeiffer will outline some fundamentals of starting a huddle — from identifying those best suited to participate, to navigating the waters of Invitation and Challenge.

Wed 3/28 EST 4-5pm EST — Eric Pfeiffer

http://huddlewebinar.eventbrite.com/

• APRIL

How to raise kids who love Jesus. The goal of any Christian parent is to raise kids happy, healthy kids who have a personal relationship with the Lord. Yet a recent study reported that the child of an atheist is more likely to have a robust Christian faith than the child of an evangelical. 89% of teenagers in a youth group will leave the church upon graduating and never return. How do we reverse this trend, assuring that our kids are the type of Christian adults we want them to be?

Thu 4/5 3-4pm EST — Sally Breen

http://raisingkidswebinar.eventbrite.com/

How to be a missional mama. For many years the common experience of young moms was one of being “benched” from meaningful ministry life. The demands of babies, toddlers and young children are often all consuming — yet the vision of being a missional mom provides an opportunity to extend your mission field from your playroom to the playground and well beyond. In this webinar, Elizabeth Paul will share practical how-to’s for what this can look like in daily life.

Tue 4/17 11-12pm EST — Elizabeth Paul

http://missionalmamawebinar.eventbrite.com/

Planting churches with a 90% success rate. By most estimates the failure rate among church plants is 80%. There are a myriad of reasons for this — from lack of funding and poor training to small teams and anemic support. In this webinar, we will paint a picture for a new reality of church planting — giving you an opportunity to hear futurist predictions, new thinking and to ask questions about planting churches in a post-Christian context.

Tue 5/1 2:30-3:30pm EST — Doug Paul

http://missionchurchplantingwebinar.eventbrite.com/ 

A prediction on where Missional Communities will be in 50 Years

If you’re trying to learn or relearn something, you have to construct a context in which that learning can take place, yeah?

Here’s an example to this point: Just imagine for a moment everyone in the world forgot how to drive a car. And they had these hunks of metal on wheels in there driveways and don’t know what to do with them. One day you hear, “There was a time when they used to drive them, sit in them, and go places.”

“No way!”

“Yeah! That circular thing is a wheel and you can turn it and it directs where that heavy thing would go. (By the way, it’s called a car).”

“Really? Because we’ve been using it for kids to climb on and we’ve put planters in the headlights. You mean it’s not to be used for lawn ornaments?”

So imagine that world. Your friend has told you this. You do a little digging and after a while you find this book and it talks about how to drive a car. What do you do? You don’t just get on the road and take it out for a spin. You have no idea what you’re doing. You have no idea how people react, or for that matter, how many people you might kill in that metal death trap. What you do is get it on a racetrack where you have space to test out the car without hurting anyone. It provides a space for you to experiment and get your bearings when driving this new vehicle.

We’ve lost the extended family and we’ve lost the oikos on mission. (Oikos being the Greek word used in the New Testament for “households” that refers to the extended families existing as households on mission for the first 300 years of the life of the church).

What we are doing with Missional Communities (20-50 people acting as an extended family on mission together) is constructing an oikos that helps us understand what the NT church did and how it did it. It’s a cocoon where we learn all of the necessary skills so that we can be an oikos and be a family on mission. Missional Communities aren’t the end goal. They are the vehicle that gets us back to the original thing. MC’s serve as the racetrack where we can get to know this foreign thing before we take it back full force onto the streets, which will take some time.

In 50 years time, people will look back and say, “It’s hilarious, they used to make people get in MC’s because they didn’t know how to do this. Isn’t that amazing!?”

Or to use another analogy…Missional Communities are to oikos what a cocoon is to a butterfly.

(***And just to clarify, because I get this in the comments fairly often, I am not proposing that we abandon worship services where all these MCs come together. I believe these are needed and valuable for sustaining the mission of these extended families. For more on this, read this post by clicking here.)

 

Why you can’t separate Discipleship from Mission :: Story from the Missional Front

One of 3DM’s Frontier Leaders, Patrick Cannon, shared this story recently:

Just got a report from one of our guys who has been ministering in a local prison. He has been unable to visit the prison for almost 4 months because of prison politics and what-not. He finally got invited back and tonight found that 3rd generation discipleship relationships had launched in his absence! (which is disciples, discipling disciples, discipling disciples). 15% of the prison population are now in intentional one-on-one discispleship relationships using a lot of the tools and principles 3DM is teaching leaders all over the world.

 

 

Lent teaching series is here!

As promised, for all of you out there who observe the season of Lent (or would be interested in trying!) as we head into Easter, we have released a Lent teaching series  (Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, is February 22) that you can download and use in your church/ministry community. This picture is the series slide and the official name of the series is LIVE FAST (yes, a clever double entendre). You can download it from our Room1228 download portal by clicking here. See below for all that the download includes, but here’s the series intro video. Personally, I think the visual storytelling by Blake Berg is absolutely brilliant.

The teaching series will include:

• Teaching notes
• Series video
• Background slides
• Small Group discussion guides
• Small Group leader guides
• + a few more extras

You can download it from our Room1228 download portal by clicking here

How I Chose Movement over Mega | The Story of Sheffield

I didn’t grow up in a Christian house, my parents weren’t believers and I became a Christian when, at 16, I picked up a Bible one day and read it. Whole thing.

And that was it. God stirred my heart and I knew I wanted to follow his Son, Jesus. I knew God wanted to offer forgiveness to me and he wanted me to offer it to others. So I went off to school, off to seminary and then into parish work (Anglican Church).

So from the very beginning, I had this great love of the scriptures. It’s how I became a Christian. And I kept reading the book of Acts and looking at the church, then reading the Gospels and looking again at the church, Paul’s epistles and back at the church…and I couldn’t shake that there was something amiss.

The life and mission of the church and the disciples seen in the Bible was almost completely missing in the communities I was a part of. I had some pretty momentous experiences with God over the first 10-15 years of ministry and tinkered around with some different things with mission and discipleship, but it all came to head when I became the Lead Rector at St Thomas’ Sheffield in 1994. (This picture is of me, Sally and our youngest, Beccy, in the late 1980’s)

It was a church rich with a tradition of new missional expressions, a pioneering spirit, a church that had started what Eddie Gibbs, at Fuller Seminary, called the first alternative or “post-modern” (not in the theological sense) worship service. It was called The 9:00 Service.

And to be honest, The 9:00 Service was a truly amazing environment.

During the 1980’s it really became quite the magnet for new missional approaches as some of the best leaders in Europe in North America were coming to see what they were doing and how they could learn. Unfortunately, as often times happens with wildly successful churches, the leader turned quite inward and became almost sociopathic, and if that wasn’t enough, deeply immoral. We don’t need to get into all the gory details, but it was ugly.

This congregation, which had by that time planted off of St. Thomas as its’ own church, was closed by the Church of England because of those reasons.

I was called there as the senior pastor, they call it the ‘Team Rector,’ in 1994, a year after that congregation had left and a year before it was closed. And because of that, we were caught right in the middle of it. In fact, to this day, it is the largest and longest running church scandal in British history.

This is what I walked into.

It ran forever and ever and ever.

We were on television every day and on the front page of the newspaper all the time because the only physical building that could be associated with this congregation was our building, even though we were no longer together. We got every ounce of bad press.

So clearly as part of that process, learning to cultivate a culture of accountability and discipleship was huge.

There were several things I did there when I arrived, particularly as I was functioning within a tight and somewhat constraining hierarchical system (I have a Bishop, I’m the Priest, I serve the Congregation). You know how it is.

Creating a discipleship culture was incredibly important, so we needed to model everything we did after Jesus. I wanted to create a culture that had three dimensions to it just as Jesus lived out three dimensions in his life, UP/IN/OUT.

UP: deep and connected relationship to his Father and attentiveness to the
leading of the Holy Spirit

IN: constant investment into the relationships with those around Him (His
disciples)

OUT: entering the brokenness of the world, looking for a response both
individually (people coming into relationship with Jesus) and systemically (systems of injustice being transformed)…God’s Kingdom advancing.

We began to use this as our language.

UP/IN/OUT.

It’s interesting, once you start to use language of a particular kind, language that’s simple, portable and repeatable, it really does start to shape and form a culture.

So very quickly questions like this started to happen: “Is your Small Group doing any OUT?”

And simply by giving a lens to people, helping them understand that their lives and communities needed to have all three dimensions of Jesus’ life, we started to develop a missional culture. We started to experiment more and more with Small Groups working together (maybe 3-4 Small Groups for a total of 40-50 people) on a common mission and some things began to emerge out of that. At the time we called them Clusters, but over time these mid-sized missional groups started to be called Missional Communities. For us, this is where MCs were born.

It started like this: We told some of our Small Groups, “Ok, this is what your monthly rhythm could be. First week do UP, second week do IN, third week do OUT, and the fourth week, why don’t you get together with those other 2 or 3 small groups and do something together.”

Eventually the people came back and said, “You know, it’s interesting, we like the Small Groups, but we really like that bigger, mid-sized group. We love that time together. We’ve even given it a name. Is that ok? And is it ok if we spend more time in the bigger group and do mission together?”

Ummm…yes. It was ok.

They were starting to identify more and more with a group about the size of an extended family, do mission together and the small groups became a place of support and accountability. Over time, we started putting more emphasis on starting these mid-sized groups and letting the small groups emerge within them rather than just clustering them together.

Some of them were sterile and weren’t able to give birth to new mid-sized groups, but a few of them became incredibly productive and multiplied several times over. So we were seeing these MCs start to develop (again, this is the very earliest stage of their history), the church was growing rapidly and alongside of that we imported a very simple accountability maxim that we pulled from Matthew 18:15, and it was this: Don’t go and speak to any pastor about an issue that you have with another member of the congregation unless you have first spoken to them at least twice. And if you do, all we will do is turn you around and send you straight to them.

We had the same rule for the staff because it was the same rule for everybody.

That Matthew 18:15 culture was hugely significant in the life of the church. It later became engrained in the discipleship vehicle we developed called Huddles, which would prove critical a year or two down the road. And I think it was the chief reason why, after marrying more couples than I can count, there was not a single divorce in the 10 years that I was there.

Not one.

And to this day, some year later, I can really only think of 3.

You see, the environment that a Huddle creates is one where people are both invited into relationship and challenged to be who God has called them to be so it creates this beautiful culture of accountability. Maybe you treat your spouse badly, but you’re not going to go long before that relationship has to be mended because people are holding you accountable. We developed a whole language for discipleship because we knew that language creates culture. (if you’re interested in this language, you can read about it here)

So that culture continued to roll on and the building simply wasn’t big enough. At this point in time we had 4 services, two in the morning, two in the evening and it was standing room only. And it was during this time we had this very real sense that God was giving us a specific mission: Call the city back to God.

Not just the suburbs where we were located, on the rim of the city. The whole of the city. And if that was to happen, we’d need to have a presence in the city and the suburbs.

I went to the Bishop and asked if he could give us a few other buildings in the city that were no longer being used. There was a precedent for this as another church, Holy Trinity Brompton in London, had been given additional buildings. And he said this: “Never. Watch my lips so we are very clear. Never.”

“Well here’s the thing, Bishop, I have no room left in the church. What am I supposed to do with all of these people?”

“Why do you want to grow anymore?”

“Because it’s the Gospel imperative and it’s what Jesus wants us to do. “Go and make disciples and such.”

And I kid you not, he said, “Yeah, I don’t think that’s right. You’re putting too much pressure on the other clergy so I need you to stop growing.”

“But I’m not really even doing anything. It really is God!”

“That’s great, but I need you to stop it.”

Needless to say, there was a certain separating of paths at that point.

So I went back to my team, spent some time with them, and I came back to them with a plan. I would take somewhere between 2/3 to 3/4 of the church and re-plant it into the center of the city that had been devoid of a real Christian presence for at least 50 years. It wasn’t just the normal white flight of the Christian church that we see in Western churches, but also the dismembering and dismantling of the church that we see happening all across Europe over the last couple of generations. It meant that the cities themselves, at best, had a few tiny congregations and the enormous, ornate buildings were simply edifices of an era gone by with no one in them. There weren’t people in the buildings.

Statistically, Sheffield has just under 2% of the population in a church each Sunday. A good sized church has about 39 people (seriously).

So that’s what we’re talking about here. When we say it’s a post-Christian context, we really mean it.

I turned up at the meeting that was set up to discuss this further and the Bishop was waiting there with the assistant Bishop, both Archdeacons and the Dean of the Cathedral. The Dean was there because I was planning on moving into his parish (the parish being a geographical area that a church was specifically responsible for). In other words, I was literally encroaching on his territory. I said to them, “Here’s what we’d like to do. We’d like to take the majority of our congregation and go downtown where there really isn’t anyone and go worship in the huge gym by the Cathedral.” To say that he wasn’t exactly pleased would be a bit of an understatement.

Somehow, miraculously, I got them to agree to an “experimental” period where we’d try this out (of course “experimental,” in my mind, is something like 50-100 years!)

So we moved down into the heart of the city. We met in this gym, I guess more of a large sports facility, really, and it was absolutely awful. It had all of the echoes of a huge bucket and people were constantly walking in and out on their way to play football or work out. It was a terrible place to meet but there was nowhere else to go. On top of that, at the end of the first year we needed to increase our budget by 50%, overnight, to stay there because the cost of leasing was so exorbitant. I told the congregation this, and on a single Sunday, the whole community covenanted to give the 50% increase that was needed. And they did.

Then, literally the next day, the largest night club in the north of England goes bankrupt and was offered to us. It’s called The Roxy and was where the Rolling Stones would play before they got really big and it was just a massive space and an absolute pagan temple and we got it. And along the lines of the Celts of old, we just painted it and moved in. It’s not like our enemy is going to hang around. If you want to get rid of the darkness just turn the light on. So we did.

We put new carpet in.

We attempted to clean the toilets.

The toilets were probably the largest in the whole of Europe, I’ve never seen anything like it. You could probably get 10,000 people using it at the same time if you really wanted to.

The carpet that we laid (and this is part of the St. Thomas folklore now)…we didn’t even have to stick it down, it just laid right on top of the carpet that was already there. Because when you stepped on the original carpet it made this almost popping or sucking sound when you tried to pull your foot away as it was so sticky from all of the old beer, gum and other junk on it. It was just gross.

We put the carpet on it.

Painted.

And started worshiping.

The local TV came out and they just started interviewing people. All they would do was put a microphone in front of people and ask, “Why are you here?”

“Well, I was in prison, I was a drug addict, and one of these people visited me and I became a Christian.”

“Why are you here?”

“I used to be a prostitute and they met me on the streets and I came to know Jesus.”

“Why are you here?”

It was the best advertising anyone could ever have. Every night, in prime time, we were covered on TV. We didn’t have a marketing budget, all we had was our lives. The church grew by 500 people in a few short weeks simply because they saw us on TV. They just came, looking for transformation.

So now we had thousands in our church in a place where 2% of people go to church and the average church size is 25.

It’s just a giant.

A ways into this, I can remember the day so clearly. God asked me, “Do you want to be a mega-church pastor or do you want to be the other thing?”

Other thing? What other thing?

“God, what other thing?”

And he gave me this vision of, it’s just hard to describe, but this network of communities that just keeps extending and going and going and multiplying and are led by the people, not the pastors. It was a picture of a movement. No longer growth by addition, but growth by multiplication. Rather than the staff leading out on everything, the power would be put back into the hands of the people. I thought, “Is there a name for that?”

I didn’t hear anything. I guess we got to name it.

And God said, “So you can have the standard mega-church thing, or you can have that other thing.”

“Well God, I kind of like that movement thing. Let’s go with that one!”

A little while later God said to me, “How would you feel if I took the building away?” (God often speaks to me in questions or riddles)

I literally sat up and said, “You’re kidding right?”

Silence.

So that same morning, I came to the building and met with our staff and said, “Ummm…yeah…the Lord asked me a question this morning and I think we need to prepare for the possibility that we’re going to lose our building.”

Everyone is just staring blankly at me, with that deer in the headlights look.

“What we’ve got to do is really start to focus on these mid-sized Missional Communities, because if the building goes, it’s the only thing that’s going to be floating. There’s no where else to go.” So we focused on that and put tons of energy into it and a year later, almost to the day, one of our tech guys was just checking with the local Fire Chief about some heaters and the Fire Chief says, “Hey, who said you could meet in here?”

“Ahhh, I don’t remember if anyone said we could, but no one said we couldn’t. We did the paperwork. They know we’re here. It’s all legal.”

“You can’t be here. It’s illegal.”

“What do you mean it’s illegal?”

“The whole building is live. Electricity is shooting through the frame of the building. If anyone drilled through one of these walls they’d die.”

“Well how could we fix it?”

“Honestly? Knock it down.”

“Knock it down?”

“Yep. Knock it down and rebuild it.”

Sure, we could have fixed it, but we knew what God was asking of us. So one weekend, shortly thereafter, the entire church planted out across the city into loads of these mid-sized Missional Communities. They’d meet in garages, bowling allies, pubs, parks, houses, coffee shops, restaurants, everywhere you could think of.

We nicknamed Sunday mornings “The Pony Express” as the staff would gather early at the old Parish Church and we’d take out tubs of children’s supplies, Holy Communion, announcement sheets, offering bags. Let’s just say this wasn’t the most systematized thing quite yet! It would become far more efficient and streamlined in the years to come, but right now we were just trying to make it work. These MCs, groups of 20-50 people who all had one, focused mission together, were led by regular, ordinary members of the church. Our job as the staff became equipping them. To resource them. To let them lead and live into their calling. At the time, it was impossible to rent a space big enough to hold all of us each week, so we were only able to get all of our MC’s together about every 6 weeks. It was invigorating and terrifying at the same time.

Finally the Lord gave us a large, industrial campus called Philadelphia and we turned those warehouses into a worship space and training centers, but the campus is built completely around equipping and resourcing disciples on mission. With this campus we were able to start meeting weekly again for people who wanted to worship as a whole community each week. Some MCs would come every week, some would only come once a month or every-other-week and worship in their Missional Community the other three weekends.

We had been homeless for more than a year, and a year later, the number of mid-sized Missional Communities had doubled, with each MC trying to reach into and incarnate themselves into a specific kind of network or neighborhood.

MCs for creative professionals.

MCs for the homeless.

MCs for parents with new babies.

MCs for Iranian Muslims.

MCs for artists.

MCs for people who all work at the same place or live in the same neighborhood.

MCs for gang members who were becoming Christians.

MCs for foreign students at the university.

We were reaching every kind of person you could imagine, seeing more people come to Christ than we could count. And then this incredibly diverse group of people would all gather and worship together once a month at a place big enough to hold us. As Newbigin says, it was both a “Sign” and a “Foretaste” of the coming, fulfilled Kingdom. But we were experiencing it here and now.

Previously, our missional engagement was more about discipling people well so they were released as missionaries in their every day comings and goings (which we always need). But now, we had focused communities of mission where there disciples were working in concert with each other. In other words, the missional force was so much stronger when it had the gravitational pull of an extended family size (20-50 people).

Shortly thereafter, somewhere in the beginning of the year in 2000, Christian Research (formerly Marc Europe), led by a brilliant statistician named Peter Brierley, released a report stating we had the largest attendance of any church in England, and probably, the largest in Europe.

Now I’m not giving you that to brag, I give it to you to make an important point. If you were to go to Sheffield today, which is now the epicenter of a worldwide missional and discipling movement, they would not tell you how many people attend the church. I doubt most of the people would even realize how big the church is because it doesn’t look or function like a really sizeable church.

If you asked how big the church is, they would simply tell you how many disciples they have in Huddles because that is what they count. They count how many people are engaged in active, accountable, discipling relationships. Their whole structure for church is built around making disciples and releasing them, and because of that, that’s what they count. For them, that’s the metric that matters. That’s the Great Commission imperative.

How many disciples do we have?

St Thomas Sheffield isn’t a massive church and the center of a movement because it’s got the best worship service. Or the best digital experience. Or the best preachers/teachers in the world. It’s because everything they do is about making disciples. They honestly believe if you make disciples and release them to lead, release them into their destiny, release them to be Agents of the Kingdom, everything will change. If we are great at making the disciples, church growth will never be a problem because to be a disciple means you’re a missionary. It was never OK for us to be a large church and have very few missionary disciples. So we built something where that couldn’t happen.

Making disciples was in the DNA from the very beginning and it has just carried through.

Once we got into the new building, not long after, God made it quite clear that he wanted me to hand over the church to the young guys I was discipling. The church wasn’t mine to hold onto. God was absolutely clear this needed to happen.

The Lord told me I was supposed to leave.

“Where do you want me to go?”

SILENCE.

“Honestly. Where you do you want me?”

“Mike, I mean we’ll wait and see.”

And that was the truth. Honestly. It was like a real Abrahamic call and one many of my pastor friends didn’t understand at the time: “Why would you give up the church we all would want to pastor?”

All I knew was I supposed to go to America and I would be shown what to do. The years that followed I was a coach, a consultant, a writer, a practitioner, a speaker. I’ve worked with mega-churches and church plants and everything in between. There have been many times where it has felt like walking in the desert (a time which may have lasted 7 years). To be honest, there were mornings where it was difficult to get up. I felt so unbelievably lost at times, not knowing exactly where to go or what would come next until finally, God said, “This is it. This is what the rest of your life is going to be about.” So we formed what we call 3DM; which, simply, is a movement of churches and missional leaders helping other churches and leaders who, like St. Thomas Sheffield, are learning to put discipleship and mission at the center of everything.

You see for us, it’s not just theory.

If you make disciples, you really do get the rest.

If you make disciples and release them, you will get a growing church.

If you make disciples, you get the missional thing.

If you make disciples, the places where society is torn in two and frayed at the edges start to be mended.

Sometimes people talk about the book of Acts as if it’s something that could never happen again. And in part, they are right. But I think Jesus was quite serious when he said we would do greater things than he did, which we see in Acts. But I also believe we will see greater things than we read about in the book of Acts. I believe it because I’ve seen it. And I believe that’s the story Jesus is inviting all of us into.

Why I don’t believe in Christian Accountability | A Response

Earlier this month, Mike Foster wrote an article entitled “Why I don’t believe in Christian Accountability” and it whipped around the web like you might expect. I’ve read it a few times now and I thought it was worthy enough to write a response because it’s such an important topic if we’re going to wrestle through the issues of discipleship mission. Now I don’t know Mike, but I have friends who do and really enjoy him and find him to be an incredibly kind, thoughtful and humble guy. After reading his post, I’m sure he is. To be fair to him, he does have some very compelling things to say in this post, but I think there are a few things he misses that are critical for us.

In essence, this is the crux of his argument:

• Christian accountability doesn’t work and is mostly toxic for those who participate.
• It doesn’t work because of lack of grace, bad environments where we are held accountable, we often lie if we want to escape being held accountable (“gaming the system”) and often hurts more people than it helps.
• Therefore, we should get rid of the whole notion of Christian accountability.

Now before you think he’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater (which is how I perceived on my first read), he then advocates for a “different” thing:

• Instead of “accountability”, let’s be “advocates”, people who are fellow supporters and intercessors. He believes a new word is needed.
• These “advocates” should demonstrate radical grace, focus on what people are saying yes to (and not just what they are saying no to), prioritize people and not organizations.
• Lastly, have different environments where people and groups have different levels of access for you to be honest, rather than restricting it to one group and have a “First Call” where there is at least one person who has 100% access to the whole of your life.

First things first, it becomes pretty clear that Mike Foster believes in accountability, he just doesn’t like the word because of the way people abuse it. In the same way that people don’t like to be called Christians and instead call themselves “Christ Followers,” his proposal is probably close to the way that most people would ideally see Christian accountability happening.

What I’d like to do is perhaps push his thought a bit further and add a bit of nuance.

You see, the way that Mike seems to describe the purpose of accountability or advocacy (and the way most people seem to) seems to be making sure you are doing certain things and not doing other things. And there is something I think he taps into. Many Christians approach this life as if there is a giant check-list in the sky of do’s and don’ts. Now to be sure, there are things that we can say are “Godly” and things that aren’t, and we should walk the way of the straight and narrow, but what I’m concerned with is the process of doing so.

The way I hear people talk about it, faith is mostly about doing the right things, as if it’s all about behavior modification, or as Dallas Willard calls it, “sin management.”

But clearly this isn’t the way Jesus thinks about it.

He says, “Most people think about the outside of the cup or dish, but the inside is filthy. I’m telling you to worry about the inside first.” His position seemed to be if you attended to the inside, the outside would certainly follow suit. Over and over again in the Sermon on the Mount, he seems to be saying,

“Guys, I’m talking about a new reality! It used to be about just following the rules. But the problem with that is it never got to the heart of things. The issue isn’t murder or lying or adultery. Don’t do those things, but seriously, what are your motivations? What’s causing your heart to take you to these places? I’m telling you that if you even entertain the thought of adultery, you might as well be doing it. A sin is a sin is a sin. Let’s start working on the heart.”

It’s about a new reality for Jesus.

Now I’m not suggesting that we should ignore giant holes in our life like drug addiction, affairs, lying, etc and draw lines in the sand, but I am suggesting the more we focus on orienting the inner parts of our life towards God and his coming Kingdom, the more our behavior will reflect this change.

That’s why Jesus says in Mark 1:
The time has come. The Kingdom is near. Repent and Believe the Good News!

You Repent, then you Believe.

Repent is the word metanoia, which refers to an inner reality. It’s about changing your mind. It’s about re-orientation. It’s about coming to understand reality and setting ourselves to live in it. Seeing things differently.

Believe (often used for the word faith as well) is the word pisteuo, which speaks to a certainty that results in action. It’s not blind faith, it’s a bit like experienced knowledge. It’s saying, “I believe the sun will rise tomorrow so I’ll set my alarm.” The belief results in action. It’s that your actions tell everyone what you believe. It’s not blindly believing that God is good; it’s about knowing that God is good because you’ve seen and experienced his unending goodness and that changes the way you live.

The problem is that we’ve often reversed it and that’s what I read in Mike’s post. We make faith about an abstract reality, something we believe “out there” and repentance is something we “do.” We’ve flipped it!

Let’s take a common “accountability” example. For men, you often hear about them struggling with pornography and the usual accountability group or teaching goes something like this: “You struggle with porn? That’s wrong. You need to stop. Stop looking at it.” That’s what repentance looks like in this system. But that’s not how repentance is discussed in the Bible. The real question is WHY. Why can’t you stop looking at it? What inside of you that needs to be redeemed, is causing that behavior?  If we don’t address the inside, we end up with Jesus’ parable: A clean dish on the outside (well, at least most of the time) with something quite dirty on the inside.

But Jesus gives us a fantastic picture of how we should address this. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount he closes with the well-known parable of the wise and foolish builder. The foolish person isn’t the person who doesn’t hear what Jesus has to say; he’s the person who hears but doesn’t do anything with what he hears. Both the wise and the foolish man hear what Jesus says, but only one does something with it.

It’s not management of sin, it’s the development of wisdom. The whole of Matthew 7 is about accountability. If you’ve heard the word, you ought to do something about it.

I think it’s incredibly harmful to boil accountability down to a list of things we should/shouldn’t do. That’s behavior modification and sin management, not faith in our Lord Jesus! It should include questions of integrity and character, but it’s missing an important element, an element that Jesus introduces in this parable, the two fundamental questions of Christian Spirituality:

• What is God saying to you right now?
• What are you going to do about it?

It’s a posture of recognition that God is speaking to us, he’s inviting us more fully into his Kingdom every single day…and are we going to do anything with that?

• Maybe God is saying he’s never been more proud of you. What should you do about that? How will life be different in the next week because he’s said that to you?
• Maybe God is saying you to forgive your Father and now is the time. What should you do about it?
• Maybe God is saying that job promotion isn’t right for you even though it’s more money. What are you going to do about it?
• Maybe God has put a vision in your heart for your neighborhood. What are you going to do about it?

God is constantly speaking to us and is inviting us to himself and his unfolding Kingdom. His desire is that the words he speaks deep into us will change the way we see the world around us (Repentance) and result in us living differently (Belief).

What if much of the way we build our structures for accountability revolved around those questions? What if it revolved around the idea that God wasn’t always looking crossly at us, but was reaching out to us, inviting us into a different way of living? What if accountability was more about stepping into the Kingdom because God has spoken something fresh and new to us and we want to make sure we take those steps?

What if it was about the inside changing and then the outside following suit?

As I think about this, one thing comes to mind mind:

• It would mean people would need to learn to hear God. Most people I meet really have very little idea how to listen to God, hear what he’s saying…much less respond to what he’s asking. But the word “disciple” means learner, in the original Greek. So that’s good news for us! It means we can learn to hear the voice of our Father, even if we are starting off at a place where we hear very little.

Everyone has to start somewhere, right?

Due to demand…more workshops coming to you!

In December we hosted our first Workshop on Discipleship in Mission in Pawleys Island — for the first time giving an opportunity for individuals to engage with the 3DM content and experience vehicles for discipleship and mission — like Huddles and Missional Communities.

It quickly filled up, so we did another in January, then another in Denver — and since we’ve had an outpouring of requests for more. So we’re excited to announce dates for a series of workshops in spring 2012, hoping to give as many opportunities for connection as possible. If you’re interested in registration or more details, check out the links below.

• February 14-16, 2012 — Minnesota

http://wsminneapolis1202.eventbrite.com

 

•  February 21-23, 2012 — Kansas City

http://20120221kansascityws.eventbrite.com

 

•  March 22-23, 2012 — Fort Wayne, IN

http://wsftwayne1203.eventbrite.com

 

•  March 27-29,2012 — Pawleys Island, SC

http://20120327piworkshop.eventbrite.com

 

Churches looking for a Silver Bullet in a microwave culture

The past 6 weeks or so I’ve spent discussing the importance of creating extended families on mission (Missional Communities of 20-50 people) and in the midst of that time I’ve been doing workshops talking about similar things.

In these last few weeks, two things have stuck out to me in interacting with pastors about Missional Communities:

1. So many pastors are looking for the Silver Bullet. They are looking for the one thing that can save the day and keep their church (and the church in general) from the precipitous decline they are facing.
2. They are hoping to master whatever this Silver Bullet is, whatever it may be, and hoping they can do so almost overnight. As if you could stick their church in a microwave, and two minutes later…DING!…”it’s ready!”

First, I do believe there is a Silver Bullet for the church and it’s discipleship. However, the issue is that discipleship is something that is simple, but hard, not complex and easy. It takes a while. And because we’ve been about building churches first and foremost (hoping it would grow as quickly as possible) and rather whimsically hoping we get disciples out of it, we’re not accustomed to the amount of time and energy it takes to make even one disciple.

More and more I see this phenomenon happening with Missional Communities (MC’s) as well. I meet pastors who are looking for a quick fix to their seemingly unfixable problems. They assume that learning how to start, grow, disciple people and multiply MC’s is as simple as doing a 40 Days of Purpose sermon series. But it’s just not. It takes a long time to learn it.

Think of it this way.

Most pastors spend years and years becoming experts in running Sunday morning worship gatherings. They go to seminary for it. Spend 15-30 hours of sermon prep each week. Many grew up attending worship services and are thus pre-conditioned to have a certain level of expertise already (through the immersion process). If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say it takes about 5 years of hard work before a pastor feels really competent in large gathering services. A lot of time and energy have gone into this.

Why do we assume that learning something like Missional Communities will be any easier or take less time? Why do we think we can learn to do MC’s faster than we can learn the worship service, something that most of us grew up with? MC’s are foreign to so many of us. It’s not like we can stick it in a microwave and pop it out.

I was talking with our Director of Content last week, Doug Paul, and he mentioned that he didn’t feel he was competent in launching, growing and multiplying Missional Communities for 18 months…and even then, he only felt he was “OK” at it and was still a ways off from “very good at it.” I imagine people like Michael Stewart at VERGE/Austin Stone and Jeff Vanderstelt at SOMA would agree, as they’ve been doing great work with Missional Communities for several years now. It’s not easy, it’s not quick and it takes time to learn.

Now it’s completely worth it, but if we approach it like it’s a quick fix that will come easily, we’ve got a surprise coming our way.

I keep coming back to this quote from J.S. Bryan, but I think it’s so true:

Many men can build a fortune, but few men can build a family.

Similarly, I would say that many pastors can lead a worship service, but few pastors have the patience to learn the art of Missional Communities. It’s going to take longer than a week, a month or a year!

Lent teaching series

For all of you out there who observe the season of Lent as we head into Easter, we have some exciting news! We are going to be releasing a Lent teaching series on February 6 (Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, is February 22) that you can download and use in your church/ministry community. This picture is the series slide.

The teaching series will include:

• Teaching notes
• Series video
• Background slides
• Small Group discussion guides
• Small Group leader guides
• + a few more extras

We’ll put it up here when we release it on February 1, but just a little something to get you thinking.

Missional Communities: Authorize what already exists

One of the things that I’ve noticed over the years is that in almost every single church community, there are, already, groups of people in the beginning stages of extended family life. It’s just that they don’t know it’s what they are doing. From a sociological point of view, this is an important insight because this is the reality of the situation: If you leave human beings alone long enough, they will form extended families. It’s just what they do.

And probably in your church community, that’s already happened.

It usually happens in one of two ways. Either people start to form the beginnings of an extended family (20-50 people) based around a common, joint ACTIVITY, or it happens through AFFILIATION, when people with similar interests or life stages become friends.

Almost what inevitably happens is that the two start to inter-relate. Participating in a common activity together brings you closer and this group become friends, and doing the friends and family do. Likewise, people who naturally are drawn to each other start to do activities together.

Here’s a traditional example of this at work: Choirs.

In the average size church, you will have a choir of 30-50 people. These people are joined by the common activity of being in this musical group. However, over time, they usually become quite close. Why? Weekly practices. Weekly services. The choir Christmas party. Special Christmas services. Easter services. They just spend a lot of time together, going after a common goal! Eventually, over time, the group that was simply activity based becomes something to do with affiliation as well. They become friends. And sometimes, they start to function as a family.

This is but one example. It happens so often.

So let’s say you’re wanting to start Missional Communities in your church.

What I’ve found is that if you can spot the chrysalis of  extended families starting to form, you can AUTHORIZE it. Rather than starting from scratch in your community with Missional Communities (MC’s), show people where it’s already at work and set them free and empower them to be a Missional Community. Baptize it and let them go do the work of the Kingdom. And what you do is give them a few handles to make sure the life of the family resembles
the life of Jesus (because they are
the body of Jesus!).

SO…

• They need to have an UP dimension (time when the MC gets together to connect with the Father).
• They need to have an IN dimension (time to gather as the body of Christ, be family together).
• They need to have an OUT dimension (time spent outside of the church building, doing mission together in the world).

For most groups, this is pretty easy because they are already doing things like this. But giving this simple handle allows them to focus their time and energy and be the full embodiment of a Missional Community.

Simply authorize what already exists!