Snapshot: The next 10 years in the American church

Sabbatical can do funny things to people, can’t it? I’ve returned from mine and there are many things that I feel the Lord is bringing to the front of my mind (one of which I will begin a blog series on next week). But one of those things is simply wondering, as a Futurist, what the next 10 years of the American church will look like?

We’re seeing many things right now as we survey the landscape of the church:

• The explosion and continued growth of the mega-church, particularly with multi-site churches
•  The church seems to be getting smaller and larger. Either decline or stagnation or rapid growth in larger churches with very little in between (interestingly, we’re seeing this happen economically for Americans as well).
• Increased polarization of theological pockets within the BIG “C” Church
• Increased outworking of social justice
• Church budgets in crisis and churches starting to explore alternative revenue streams and economic engines
• Missional emphasis that, at least in my view, may already be wearing out as a fad and not as a way of life
• I’m noticing an uptick of interest in the discipleship conversation. I wonder where that will go?
• Continued assault on the nuclear family without the recognition that the extended family is actually the answer
• Huge drop in attendance for Gen X and Gen Y
• Rise in charismatic expressions (i.e. fastest growing segment of the American church right now)

That’s a very quick, snapshot overview of where we are today. There’s a lot of good in that and some things that aren’t so good.

Here’s my question to you: Where do you think the American church will be in 10 years? 

What will be happening? What will it look like? What worries you? Excites you? Where do you see it going? Where is God already moving and where do you think it’s leading?

January workshops too!

We’ve had an overwhelming response to our December workshop on discipleship and mission (see description of the workshop below). It’s not full quite yet, but it’s definitely filling up. It’s December 13-15 at the beach in Pawleys Island, SC (it’s only $99) and you can register here.

However, because of the response we’ve added another set of dates in January…January 10-12. Same exact workshop, different dates. You can register for that workshop by clicking here.

And…we’ll see how it goes, but there is a VERY good chance we’ll be doing a workshop in DENVER, COLORADO the third week of January (will know soon enough!).

More and more, people are realizing we are in the midst of a discipleship crisis in the United States which is largely responsible for the state of the American church. At the same time, there is a wave of excitement about the current missional movement that has been bubbling up in the last 10-15 years that many people are hoping will stop the bleeding. The fundamental issue, however, is that unless we are able to disciple people well like Jesus did, any missional movement is unsustainable.

Our general experience is that people are quite intrigued to hear how we’ve used things like Huddles (a discipleship vehicle) and Missional Communities (a missional vehicle) to see discipleship and mission come alive in their church communities, looking more and more like the churches we see in the New Testament. This workshop is a time to look at some of the things we’ve learned in the past 30 years, dealing with post-Christian contexts where as little as 1% of people attend church. It’ll have teaching, discussion, breakout time with your team, a chance to actually experience Huddles and Missional Communities, worship and even time at the beach. We are intentionally capping the attendance for the workshop at 200 so you have a large amount of access to 3DM’s team and whatever expertise/experience we bring to the table.

Excerpts from our theological whitepaper

Last week, 3DM and TOM began an initiative discussing the future of theological education. This is a subject near and dear to my heart and couldn’t be more excited about this. We’ve produced two things to really spark this discussion. First, a video introducing the problem, which you can watch at the bottom of this post. Second, a whitepaper addressing what we find to be among the most fundamental problems facing the world of theological education, articulates what we believe the proper aims of theological education ought to be, proposes principles for guiding us toward those aims, and provides an example of a practical way forward.

I fundamentally believe that we are in the midst of a discipleship crisis in the United States and we can do something about this by embracing some of the basic discipleship principles we see in scripture about Information, Imitation and Innovation…and this could be explosive for our seminaries, which will form the character and competency of Jesus in our leaders.

You can watch the video, download the paper and join in on the discussion by clicking on this link.

We’ll do another post soon with an exciting announcement accompanying this initiative, but first, here are a couple of excerpts from the paper:

• Simply put, the guiding thesis of this paper is that to the extent that our current systems of theological education have been shaped by Christendom presuppositions, they have lost their missiological bearings and are wholly inadequate to prepare Kingdom leaders (Part 1). Incremental changes and clever adaptations to these current systems only serve to distract from the opportunity we have before us to develop a Kingdom, and therefore missional, vision of theological education (Part 2). At the heart of this vision is the conviction that the proper telos of theological education is an “accreditation” of students based not merely on the degrees they earn, but on the development and fit of their character and competency for life and leadership in the Kingdom of God (Part 3). To this end, we argue that a missional vision of theological education will be praxeological – aimed at training reflective practitioners, mobilizational – aimed at training missionary leaders, and spiritual – aimed at training Kingdom citizens (Part 4). At the conclusion of this paper we will offer an example of a model of theological formation that we believe exemplifies many of the characteristics of the vision argued for here (Part 5).
• Consider the fact that the characteristics of graduation requirements for Christian institutions are nearly entirely the same as those of secular institutions. In other words, in our hasty attempt to match the intellectual dimension of higher education in general, we mimicked the emphasis on the markers of intellectual mastery: the successful completion of courses, exams, and papers rather than, in a manner more befitting the nature of Christian education, the markers of spiritual maturity, Christ-like character, and the competency to actually do what we have supposedly been trained for in the power of the Spirit.
• To be blunt, we might suggest that the passing on of Christian knowledge to those who lack the character and competency out of which it might be put to use is akin to passing along car keys to someone who is clearly drunk – they may able to use the tool, but if nothing horrible comes to pass, it will be by sheer grace. Thus, if the resource of Christian knowledge, available through seminaries, is to be used faithfully and unleashed to its full potential, our main task must be to re-imagine systems of theological education that have as their primary aim, the cultivation of Kingdom-oriented character and competency.
• As we consider these consequences, the question isn’t if seminaries and their programs are formational. They always are. The better question is, “Are seminaries and their programs helping students develop the kind of character and competency needed to serve faithfully as Kingdom leaders?” We simply don’t find this to be the case. Besides the plethora of anecdotal and qualitative evidence we could cite to this effect, this reality is also attested to by the fact that 75 percent of pastors say they feel “unqualified or poorly trained by their seminaries” to lead their churches well.

These are just a few choice excerpts from the paper and it moves on to making suggestions for a possible way forward.

So what do you think? Does any of this resonate with you? What are your observations?

The crisis facing seminaries + theological education

Consider this a type of press release for our newly launched initiative on re-imagining theological education. 😉

Undoubtedly there is a crisis facing the institutions that train our leaders for work in the church. Students leave seminary with crippling amounts of debt, leave feeling unprepared to lead the people of God in discipleship and mission in an increasingly post-Christian world and a staggering number of them will have left the ministry entirely within 5 years. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

However, the predominant thought is that because we’re shifting from Christendom to post-Christendom, our seminaries simply need to adjust to that cultural change and do a better job making seminary more affordable and accessible (which they definitely do) and probably change some learning styles (this is a gross-oversimplification, but these are probably the biggest ideas on their part). But what if there is something much bigger happening that we’re not seeing? What if we are missing the forest for the trees? What if we are the ones who created the crisis we’re in and not a shifting culture we must catch up to?

3DM and The Order of Mission are launching an initiative exploring some of these questions and offering a couple of preliminary steps forward (I say preliminary because it is impossible for one or two entities to fix all that ails the world of theological education, it will take a movement of various entities). We have written a formal whitepaper on this subject as well as a video to spark this much needed discussion.

Both can be viewed at: TheFutureofTheologicalEducation.com.

But here is the video that’s kicking it all off! Feel free to embed it anywhere you’d like to push the conversation out.

December workshop

Over the past few months we’ve had a tremendous amount of upswell in questions and discussion revolving around how we are training people in discipleship and mission. As a response, we’ve put together a workshop in December (and possibly one in January if there’s enough interest). You’ll get full access to me, our team, our homes and lives, etc. It’s 2.5 days and very inexpensive. Space is limited, so you’ll want to register really soon by clicking here.

Here are the details:

Dates/times
December 13-15: Starting @ 2pm on Tuesday and ending @ 1.30pm on Thursday

Place
Pawleys Island, SC (the beach!)

Cost
$99 -The cost of the event will cover the expense of the dinners for the two nights of the workshop and attendees pick up the cost of their lunches.

If you’d like a bit more information (including some FAQ’s), you can click here. 

Why I’m not using the word “Attractional” anymore

For years now, there have been ongoing discussions online, over coffee, at conferences, etc about the whole “Attractional vs. Missional” debate. Recently, the discussion has turned to questions about whether someone can be Attractional AND Missional. I’ve written a few blog posts on the subject, one of which you can find here.

However, as of today, I’ve decided that I’m done using the word “Attractional.” Why, you may ask?

The answer is fairly simple:

1. “Attractional” has a slew of different meanings. The way I use it is different than the way others use it, making it seem like I’m either agreeing with people I wouldn’t agree with or criticizing those I would agree with just because of semantics.
2. The lexicon is awash with diluted meanings. When I have a conversation about “Attractional” churches, I almost always have to have a pre-conversation that lasts for 10 minutes just so we can understand the terms of the conversation.

Sometimes we need to reclaim words, rescuing them and returning them towards their original meaning. Sometimes, we just need to stop using a word and let it die. “Attractional” is the latter. I think it needs to die.

This is what I believe:

• I believe there is inherent value in gathering a large group of people (75+)  together to worship God, submit to the scriptures, tell stories of God moving in the community, share the Lord’s Supper, etc. We gather because, with one voice, we choose to worship our Risen Lord. We gather to be reminded that we are part of his story — his present and future Kingdom. And we gather so that we can scatter as missionaries to a world that is broken and in need.
• I believe the value of worshipping God together as a community is enough on its’ own. If there was not one single person who wasn’t a Christian in attendance, it would be just as important for us as believers. Worshipping Jesus for the sake of Jesus must always be enough.
• I believe that to sustain the scattered mission of the church outside of the large gathering there is the need for regular and rhythmic times of gathering together to remind us of the bigger story we are in, reinforcing why we live the missional life we do. I’m not saying it’s impossible to sustain Kingdom mission outside of it, but it’s very, very difficult. We gather, we scatter. We gather, we scatter.
• I believe the worship gathering exists first and foremost for believers, for people who are intentionally growing in their relationship with Jesus. Yes, people who don’t know Jesus yet can come, but honestly, they aren’t our top priority in a worship service. Can they come to faith in a service? Yes. Should we provide opportunities for them to step more fully into a relationship with Jesus? Yes. Can a pre-Christian benefit from experiencing the worship of believers? Absolutely. But we need to understand that if the worship service is our primary place of mission we’ve already lost the battle. We may believe in the priesthood of all believers, but do we believe in the missionhood of all believers — outside the ‘gathering’?
• I believe the worship gathering should always keep an eye on the shaping of the community for mission outside of the walls of the service. When they leave the gathering, believers should know they leave as missionaries and agents of the Kingdom. How is the church community shaping that reality for people?
• I believe many who say they are advocates of the  “missional church” have thrown the baby out with the bathwater and have rejected, out of hand, larger gatherings. To an extent I understand this, but the reality is that many missional churches struggle to grow, stagnate and fizzle out. Why? Because scattering is unbelievably hard and gathering sustains. It reminds us who we are. It shows us we are part of a bigger story that is reinforced when, upon looking around, we see enough people to remind us we aren’t alone in this. We hear stories of victory and redemption. It nourishes our souls and allows the wounds of the missional frontier to receive some healing. It is not the only place care happens, but it is an important one.

Humans are creatures of overreaction. We jump ditch to ditch quite easily. Many saw the issues and the inertia involved in becoming a Sunday-centric, worship service oriented community (and rightly so!). But know this: The reason the worship service became the center of evangelism and mission is because we stopped making missional disciples who understood the nature and purpose of scattering. We’re bad at discipleship and so we’ve gotten ourselves into this predicament. Scattering is the cake and gathering is the icing in the life of the church. We’ve become a fat church from eating a lot of icing. But don’t throw out the icing! Cake just never tastes quite  as well without it.

This blog post is part of a 6 week series related to the release of my new, re-written edition of Building a Discipling Culture: How to release a missional movement by discipling people like Jesus did, which shows how we made disciples in a truly post-Christian context. If you’re interested in picking it up, click here.

a move in the digital direction

Slowly but surely we are attempting to put more and more free resources into the hands of people interested in discipleship and mission in an increasingly post-Christian culture. Obviously doing it digitally is the easiest way to do this and we are slowly building this portion of 3DM out. While we are currently working on a completely new website, we have started to do a lot more to utilize our Facebook page. If you haven’t “liked” our page yet, you can do so by clicking here. The page is updated daily and here are some of the things you’ll find there:

• Daily audio from the scripture reflection I do with our Pawleys Island team every morning
• Written reflections from the daily Moravian text readings from various writers across the world (if you’d like to get the daily email of scripture readings from the Moravian prayer texts, you can sign up here)
• Posts of various blog posts of people within 3DM
• Videos that pertain to our subject
• Updates on events we have across the country
• Pictures of various learning communities, speaking engagements, consultations, team days, dinners, etc

Is seminary “working?”

One of the things that has become abundantly clear in our work with pastors and leaders is that there is a devastating disconnect between the ways that our seminaries and theological schools train and equip leaders for ministry and the realities that these leaders are facing day in and day out.  Noticing this has caused us to begin asking (along with many others), “What is the future of theological education?”  While we don’t think we have all answers to that question, we do have some thoughts and would like to invite you to an evening of dialogue about this important topic in Chicago.

•  When:  Thursday, October 27 from 7-9 PM
• Where: Northern Seminary, Lindner Conference Center
• What: Presentations of a video and paper on the future of theological education followed by responses by Dr. David Fitch and others and an open question and response time.
• Cost: There is no charge to attend this event, but we would ask that you register here, so that we have an idea of how many will be joining us for the evening.

How do you make missional disciples?

Yes. The term “missional disciple” is redundant, isn’t?! I wish we were in a world where when I say the word “disciple”, everyone understands that clearly means the word “missionary.” But we don’t. So to be clear…it’s about making missional disciples.

So maybe you’ve read the last two posts I did on “Why the missional movement will fail” (Part 1 and Part 2). And perhaps you think I’ve made some good points and you’d like to know THE HOW. How do we make missional disciples?  I think if we’re going to be serious about making missional disciples, it starts with us (clearly). We have to be discipling leaders. We need to invest in a small group of people (I’d suggest 4-10) who we’ve made an invitation to for that kind of relationship. If we’ve done that…what will this discipling relationship need to produce the kind of fruit we see in scripture?

Why don’t we start at the 10,000 foot level for this post.

In the past few years there has been a lot of discussion about the continuum of the ORGANIZED and the ORGANIC. Much of this has revolved around the book my friend Neil Cole wrote called Organic Church. From my viewpoint, as I’ve studied the scriptures and the great discipling movements (which, not coincidentally, would also be great missional movements) of the past 2000 years, I’ve noticed this continuum at work.

Rather than having a commitment to either/or, I see a pattern of both/and. I saw that there was a formal, intentional, organized time that was committed to investment into the life of someone. It tends to happen at the same time, the same place, with the same people. There was a kind of discipleship formality to it. There was a VEHICLE that this happened with (for instance, John Wesley developed “class meetings” as his vehicle of intentional discipleship).

However, this wasn’t it. There is also a commitment to the ORGANIC component as it relates to the discipling relationship. You don’t just relate to the people you’re discipling in the more formal time focused on discipleship and reflection. It’s not as if you aren’t discipling people and showing them the ways of Jesus when it’s “focused discipleship time.” It’s always happening. You are asking them to be part of your life, a part of the life of your family. So your lives become intermingled together. Dinners. Parties. Work days. Grocery store trips. Mission. Worship services. Birthdays. Anniversaries. Funerals. (Imagine how the disciples participated in the life of Jesus…that’s what we’re talking about). What we are really talking about is allowing the small number of people you are discipling to have ACCESS to your life that very few people get…the kind of access only the 12 had to the life of Jesus. You need a VEHICLE and you need people to have ACCESS to the life of the discipling leader. It must be both the organized and the organic.

This is what’s important to understand about the ORGANIZED and the ORGANIC: The invitation to someone you’re discipling isn’t to the vehicle. It’s not “Hey, do you want to be part of my Small Group? Triad? Class meeting? Huddle?” (or whatever you’re doing) The invitation is to your life. You are giving your life as something to be imitated, to do as Paul said, “Imitate me as I imitate Christ.” That word imitation is used over and over again in the New Testament and it’s not one we as Western Christians are terribly comfortable with.

But this invitation to discipleship, to our life, is essentially this: “I feel like the Lord is asking me to invest in you. And in the places you see in me that look like Jesus, copy those things. That things that don’t…scrap them! Don’t copy them.” Eventually they’ll be able to innovate the things in their own life they are imitating, but people need a starting point!

This begs an all-important question: If people imitated your life, would that be a good thing?

Do you have a life worth imitating? Would it be beneficial to have another 10 people like you running around? And there’s the rub, yes?

BUT…there is one other crucial component that is needed. It’s actually fascinating to see how this last piece plays out in the life of Jesus, the New Testament and every missional movement that has swept the known world in the past 2000 years. Each had an agreed discipling language that everyone used to shape their lives and the life of the community that embodied the teachings in scripture about life in the Kingdom of God. A few quick examples:

• Jesus and the early church: Short parables about life in the Kingdom of God
• Monastic missional movements: Rule of Life (think about the Benedictines with their 13 rules)
• John Wesley: Twenty-one questions for his class meetings (my favorite is the last question: “Have I lied in any of the answers in the previous questions?”)

Having an agreed discipling language is one of those small, subtle things that makes all the difference in the world because almost every cultural anthropologist will tell you that language creates culture. The fact of the matter is that you have a culture in your church which means you have a shared language. But chances are it’s by accident and that means there’s a high probability it isn’t producing the culture you’re hoping for so it will produce missional disciples.

What language does is allow a fluid and easy way of traversing between the ORGANIZED (vehicle) and the ORGANIC (access). Eventually, over time, this scriptural discipleship language shapes the way you think, behave, live. It transforms you and the community that is also shaping you because it’s creating a culture. For me, I’ve spent the last 30 years of my life developing a language that would work in a post-Christian context, developing a vehicle called Huddle that would deliver those more organized, formal discipling times. So how about you?

• Have you seen these things at work?
• What does your organized time look like?
• Are you being attentive to the organic times?
• Do people have access to your life?
• Do you have a dynamic discipling language, or is it happening by accident?

This blog post is part of a 6 week series related to the release of my new, re-written edition of Building a Discipling Culture: How to release a missional movement by discipling people like Jesus did, which shows how we made disciples in a truly post-Christian context. If you’re interested in picking it up, click here.

3DM in Chicago!

I’m going to be in Chicago for a few days on October 27-29. If you’re in the Chicago-land area, I would LOVE to see you. We’re going to be at Northern Seminary out in Lombard near Wheaton. Here’s what the schedule of those few days is going to look like:

• Thursday | October 27: 7-9pm. We’ll be presenting a whitepaper and video on re-imagining theological education followed by an extended time of discussion and Q&A. Going to be making some pretty provocative statements and the discussion time should be stellar.
• Friday | October 28: 9am-5pm. 3DM in Chicago: A workshop on discipleship and mission. We’re going to spend the day exploring the link between discipleship and mission and how if we re-embrace the ancient calling of discipleship, we’ll get the whole “missional” thing. You can register for this event by clicking here.
• Friday & Saturday | October 28-29. Missional Learning Commons.I’ll be helping to facilitate this event with the Ecclesia Network and you can register for it by clicking here. This year, the focus is on discipleship. Here are some of the questions that will be shaping our time together:
  + What does discipleship actually look like in our lives?
  + Does the gospel we preach naturally and organically lead people into discipleship, or does it feel like an extra
  curricular activity?
  + How should the call to make disciples shape and guide our church practices: what we do, and how we do it?
  + What is the significance of discipleship as the core component of the formation of Christian leaders?

If you’re in Chicago, we’d love to see you there over those three days. It should be a great time together.