Kairos watches — surprising places God breaks in

The 3DM family includes a group called Wayfarer, who are the expert when it comes to resourcing for discipleship and mission as it relates to teenagers and young adults.

Each year they put on an amazing summer camp for teens and this summer’s Wayfarer Camp theme was Kairos. To accompany the theme, they created Kairos Slap Watches — as a tangible reminder that God can break in at any time. To say that everyone went crazy for the watches would be an understatement. Who’s to say if it was the addictive property of slap bracelets, the 90s nostalgia or the message itself — but kids and youth workers alike were wearing the watches, trading the faces, creating slap watch games and talking about where God was breaking through in their lives. It was fantastic to see.

At first we only produced enough for camp, but we kept being asked by friends of followers where they could get Kairos slap watches for themselves. And while we aren’t exactly looking to go into the fashion business, we thought the requests might be an indicator that there’s demand. So as of today, you can have your own Kairos Slap Watch for $10 in large or small sizes.

Below is a video we were sent by the staff of The Well, a college ministry at The University of Alabama, where Kairos watches will surely sweep the campus this fall. It made us laugh out loud, so we thought you might enjoy it.

You’ll also find some pictures of the watch, which you can order here: www.kairoswatch.com.

Saturday links

Here’s a review of some of the most interesting articles/blogs/videos we’ve been reading this week:

• Why the 9/11 Cross Should Offend all of us–Christianity Today
• State of the Church | 2011–Barna
• How to start an Education Revolution–Fast Company
• Re-imagining Church Planting–Doug Paul (3DM’s Content Director)
• Do you want to learn how to make disciples?–Ben Sternke
• Emerging Trends in Church webdesign 
• Do pastors really need seminary?–Ministry Matters
• Who is Jo Saxton?–thought provoking video by our own Jo Saxton
• Praying with Walter Brueggemann–via JR Woodward

 

Don’t drink the water: How culture has corrupted the American Church

One of the things we have to develop if we are to be missionaries to those around us is the ability to step back from our culture and observe it carefully and thoughtfully. We do this so we can best connect the Gospel of Jesus — of his available Kingdom — with the culture we live in. We also do it so we can be careful not to let toxic pieces of the culture we are seeking to redeem insinuate themselves into our worldview. That’s why we are told “be in the world, but not of it.” Being observers and exegeters of culture teach us how to “be not of it.”

Let me offer an example that, perhaps, will stir the pot.

If you read The Culture Code by Clotaire Rapaille (and if you’re serious about reaching the American culture, you need to read it), he talks about the culture of the United States. He says many things, but one thing he mentions is that part of the “code” of America is the culture of abundance. We don’t just buy what we need, we buy far above and beyond that. In fact, if you get down into the history of this country, you see that this is actually woven into the fabric of America since its’ inception. It’s absolutely fascinating.

So in this culture we find ourselves in, abundance is good.

But it goes further than that. We ascribe certain qualities and virtues to abundance — “success” or “value” or “meaning.” In American culture, a simple formula is this: The more money/stuff/friends/houses you have = the more successful/valuable/meaningful you are. It’s a simple formula and we probably see it all around us. People base their personal identity and value on the degree of abundance they are living into. We know this is destructive. All we have to do is look at our current financial system and see how unstable this is. Yet it’s all around us.

What’s interesting is how it is playing out in more subtle ways, insinuating itself into much of the world Christians inhabit. The sad reality is that churches/pastors live by the same simple formula: The more you have = the more successful/valuable/meaningful you are. In other words, the more people go to your church, the better you are as a pastor. The more people that show up on a Sunday morning, the more successful you are. We’ll even reward you with special perks to affirm you are special: The conference circuit. If your church gets big enough, we’ll stick you on a stage with the spotlight on you in front of thousands and thousands of your peers, who lean forward with baited breath, waiting to hear what you have to say.

The more people in your church = the more successful and influential you are. Or more simply, “Big = right.”

Here’s my question: Who says so?

Who in the world says that formula is right? Where in scripture can I find it written that people with the biggest churches are the most successful in the eyes of Jesus and his Kingdom? Now I’m not saying that big churches can’t be successful in the eyes of the Kingdom, I’m simply saying it’s not a given. I’m saying that just because you have a lot of people coming to your church doesn’t mean you’re actually preaching and living out the Gospel of Jesus. This formula we’ve accepted in our church culture is an adoption of the wider culture, not the culture of real Kingdom life. It has insinuated itself into our thinking and we must see how toxic it is. In fact, you would have a hard time convincing me that our enemy’s strategy isn’t to let a certain % of churches grow to reinforce this toxic and warped way of thinking. It pushes us away from true Kingdom success, so it’s not really a loss for him, is it?

Really hear what I’m saying. We should want our churches to grow and see more and more people come to faith and be discipled. But it’s not about size. I pastored one of the largest churches in Europe. But I didn’t evaluate the success of our church on the size or % growth of our church attendance.

It’s about quality, not quantity. If I had to pick between a church of 50 people who were all disciples and Kingdom citizens or 5,000 people who went to my thing on Sunday but few were actual disciples…I’d take the smaller group every time. EVERY TIME. Because that is what Jesus valued most, it’s what I value most.

How many churches at the end of the year ask themselves, “Did we grow this year?” and use the answer to this question as a barometer of success or failure? Yes, of course we want our churches to grow and see more people come to faith. But that is in the Lord’s hands, not our own. Life in the Kingdom of God says that success is faithfulness. Period. Success is obedience. Success is doing what God has asked you to do and being faithful to him, letting him control outcomes. Daniel in the Old Testament refused to eat the food of the culture for fear of being contaminated. My friends, our churches and our minds are contaminated. The “world” has crept in and warped the way we see things.

The value of your ministry is not evaluated on how big it is and how fast it is growing, as if we were stockholders evaluating the growth of the shares we hold. Your ministry is successful if, and only if, you and your community are obedient to what God has asked you to do. Ask yourself this question: Are we being faithful?

There were times in Jesus’ ministry when he had more than 20,000 people coming to hear him speak, hanging on every syllable, wondering what he’d say or do next. This same man lost next to everyone, with even his closest friends leaving him. We see the same kind of journey for the Apostle Paul. Yet in the eyes of the Kingdom, both are “successful” because they were obedient.

Perhaps there is no better way to close this post than with the covenantal prayer that John Wesley would use and has become a guiding prayer in my own personal journey. May it comfort and disturb you:

I am no longer my own, but thine.
Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.
Put me to doing, put me to suffering.
Let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee,
exalted for thee or brought low for thee.
Let me be full, let me be empty.
Let me have all things, let me have nothing.
I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.

And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, thou art mine, and I am thine. So be it. And the covenant which I have made on earth, let it be ratified in heaven.

Amen.

You can’t get around it…Discipleship leads to Mission

I feel like one of the key phrases of my understanding of my own life and the life of Jesus is this: Discipleship leads to mission.

The two things are synonymous. If you make disciples well, like Jesus did, you will get the missional thing. If you’ve been traveling with me on this blog for a while, you’re probably sick to death of hearing it. But I feel I must continually return to it, you know? In the past thirty years we’ve seen pastors come out of the church growth movement who have forsaken discipleship for the purpose of mission. “We don’t want to be inwardly focused, we want to be outwardly focused.” The problem is that Jesus gave us a model for how to do missional and he outwardly focused thing: Make disciples. If we make disciples, we will shape and form people who did all of the things that Jesus did who was, by nature, a missionary sent by his Father. So if we are to be like Jesus, every single one of us must be missionaries. The problem is we aren’t too stellar at shaping people who look like Jesus and can do what Jesus could do.

Now we didn’t write or produce this video…but I feel like we should have! It so beautifully illustrates what we’re going after at 3DM and the various movements that have spawned out of it. Enjoy.

You know you have a discipleship crisis on your hands when…

Here are some recent stats from the Barna Research group:

• 4,000 churches will close this year
• Only 1,500 churches will successfully launch (that’s an 80% failure rate)
• Only 15% of American churches are growing
• Of those that are growing, only 2.3% are growing through conversion. The rest is transfer growth.
• Just half of the 200,000 viable churches in America added even 1 new member through conversion last year
•  This is chasing away 1,500 pastors from ministry each month

Wrinkles in Time

At 3DM we talk a lot about KAIROS…one of the Greek words for time. I can’t think of a better explanation than this article that was sent our way by Stewart Dix on L’Engle’s classic book, A Wrinkle in Time.

“Uncanny” was one of the vocabulary words on my sixth grade vocabulary list, which was to be found within the book we were reading as a class. I remember thinking Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time was exactly that—uncanny, peculiar, and uncomfortably strange. Yet I also remember that it stayed with me—the story of a quirky girl named Meg, her overly-intelligent little brother, and their time-transcending journey to save their physicist father with the help of three mysterious beings. Madeleine L’Engle, the writer whose books invite readers to see time itself differently, passed away not too long ago. But her stories will continue to perplex sixth graders, and stay with us long after we have set them aside. L’Engle is the writer who first showed me the incredible difference between two words in Greek, which we unfortunately translate identically (emphasis added). To the English reader, chronos and kairos both appear to us as “time.” But in Greek, these words are vastly different. Chronos is the time on your wristwatch, time on the move, passing from present to future and so becoming past. Kairos, on the other hand, is qualitative rather than quantitative. It is time as a moment, a significant occasion, an immeasurable quality. The New Testament writers use the word kairos to communicate God’s time; it is real time—it is the eternal now. So it might be said for the Christian that when Jesus stepped into time to proclaim the kingdom of God among us, he came to show us in chronos the reality of kairos. “Jesus took John and James and Peter up the mountain in ordinary, daily chronos,” writes L’Engle. “Yet during the glory of the Transfiguration they were dwelling in kairos.”(1) With this story in mind, L’Engle describes kairos as that time which breaks through chronos with a shock of joy, time where we are completely unselfconscious and yet paradoxically far more real than we can ever be when we are continually checking our watches. Whatever your view of religion, it is likely an experience you can recount; a moment so sweet or magnified it seems to stop time, an ordinary or extraordinary moment wrinkled with something other than time. But L’Engle presses the Christian to see this as something to be expected. “Are we willing and able to be surprised?” L’Engle asks. “If we are to be aware of life while we are living it, we must have the courage to relinquish our hard-earned control of ourselves.”(2) If we have the courage to see it, the kingdom of God is close at hand; kairos breaking through like Christ into the world. I imagine Jacob, too, discovered the difference between chronos and kairos when he set aside the past which was about to catch up with him, along with his paralyzing fear of the future, and found himself living in “none other than the house of God.” The prophets and poets describe similar moments of waking to the present and finding the eternal dimensions of time. The shepherds in Bethlehem were going about their ordinary work when the glory of the Lord captured the moment. “Do not be afraid,” the angel announced. “I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you” (Luke 2:13-14). At this invasion of kairos into the routine of chronos, the shepherds chose to respond with action: “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about” (2:15). Uncanny encounters with time are a part of the human experience. The Christian is given a language to explain these encounters. We live somewhere between the already and the not yet, caught by the eternal now and the one who dwells within it. The implications are both temporal and unending. Will we have the courage to look for glory in the ordinary? To release control of our calendars and watches and note the eternal in our midst? The apostle joins every prophet and poet who proclaims the mystery of time, “Behold, now is the time (kairos) of God’s favor, now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2). Like Christ, glimpses of the eternal come quietly and unexpectedly; they come and upset our very notion of time and all we discover within it. Why should we be so unreconciled to time if the temporal were our only concern? Or could it be that the eternal Word stepped into flesh, into our bounded realm of time, and literally embodied the reality that time is meaningful because of the eternal one in our midst. The Christian insists that kairos is breaking into chronos and transforming it. With Christ it proclaims, “The kingdom of God is close at hand”—and the temporal world invited to break in along with it. In ordinary moments that hint at such a radical invasion, might we have the courage to be surprised by one who comes so near. ***Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity

Everything you wanted to know about Missional Communities but were too afraid to ask

More and more people have heard about Missional Communities and the unbelievably exciting prospects they give us for mission and discipleship in the church. Lots of people are writing about the possibilities and the theory behind it. But here’s the big question: How do you do it?

How do you launch them? Grow them? Disciple people in them? Lead them? Multiply them? Sustain them? Network them? Use them in an established church? Use them in a church plant? What do you do with kids? Teens? Worship? Mission? (I could do this question writing thing for quite some time!)

Well, we’d like to help people answer some of those HOW questions.

3DM is pretty excited to announce that we are going to start using Webinars as a means of interacting and training people interested in learning how to do discipleship and mission through Huddles and Missional Communities.

Our very first one is titled: Everything you wanted to know about Missional Communities but were too afraid to ask. It will last for 90 minutes with Steve Cockram, another fine British man with a great accent. 😉 More importantly, he’s a fantastic coach and strategic thinker. This particular webinar will last for 90 minutes. The first 30 minutes we’ll present some content as it relates to Missional Communities and the last hour you’ll be able to interact and ask questions. The cost of the webinar is $10.

If you’re interested, you can register by clicking here.

As for webinars in the future, we will are looking at doing a monthly menu of 2-3 that you can choose from based on your interest with very limited availability. In other words, first come, first serve for the few slots available. Stay tuned for more details.

How to know if you’re a “mature” Christian

There are many ways to gauge you’re increasing maturity as a Christian. Here is one.

It’s all about Rest and Recovery.

Think about athletes. Being an athlete isn’t determined by whether or not you’re knackered. All athletes get tired. Whether you play football, run a marathon, tennis, swim, etc. You will get tired. Your muscles will feel on the brink of exhaustion and will need to rest. However, one way to determine your prowess as an athlete is by how long you need for recovery before getting up again. All muscles get stretched and experience pain…but how long does it take you to bounce back?

Spiritual maturity as a Christian is quite similar. In this life, as you travel the path of discipleship, there will be good times and hard times. Fruiting and fallow seasons. Times of rest and work. Times of exhilaration and times of exhaustion. In those times when things are hard, where there is no fruit, when it seems all work and you’re exhausted and you desperately need to rest…when your emotional and spiritual energy is absolutely spent…how long does it take you to recover?

How long until you feel like equilibrium has been restored? When your spiritual muscles have beens stretched to the breaking, what is your recovering time?

Is it a few days? A week? A month? Longer?

You see, once your spiritual energy is spent, it takes a toll on you. Jesus himself noticed when his spiritual energy left him unexpectedly (when the woman who had been bleeding for 12 years touched the hem of his garment). Once God has used you and his Spirit has worked in you and through you in significant ways, it’ll leave you spent. If you are spiritually fit, you’ll be able to bounce back quickly. If you’re not, being used can lead to an abyss of spiritual detachment for months and months.

While this isn’t the perfect way or the only way to judge your maturity, your ability to “bounce back” after times of spiritual exhaustion (which are inevitable) give you a window into your developing maturity.

Why does church innovation = technology? | Part 2

Last week I wrote a post making the observation that increasingly in the past 15 years or so, when we put “church” and “innovation” in the same sentence it almost always has to do with innovations in technology:

• Podcasts
• Simulcasts
• Video venues
• Online campuses
• church apps
• Facebook and Twitter accounts
• etc

These are innovations and many of them have been used to help push the Kingdom forward. This should be celebrated. But the point I made was that while innovation in the place where church and technology intersects is good, what worries me is that almost all of our innovation revolves around technology. We are failing to push forward — using ingenuity and imagination in other areas of ministry  — some of the very areas that need it most.

To recap the other post: while technology is great a supplementing our flesh-and-blood relationships, it can’t and shouldn’t replace them. There is always a kind of natural distance when technology is involved and the truth of the matter is that discipleship and mission done well cannot be done at a distance. 

Not only can’t it be done well at a distance, we find ourselves in the midst of a discipleship crisis in the Western church. We are less and less effective at mission because we are terrible at making disciples who can do the things that Jesus and his disciples can do. What we need are innovations that revolve around making disciples, new methods, vehicles and ideas (most likely found in scripture and in the past) that will allow us to become great at this again.

Here’s my question for this post: Why?

Why do we find it easier to innovate something like technology and not something like making disciples?

Here are a few guesses…

1. Innovating technology doesn’t require entering in the mess of people’s lives. It’s fun to write code, design beautiful apps or websites or come up with brilliant strategies to reach people we don’t know through means of mass, faceless marketing. Mission is really hard when it’s stepping into the mess of someone’s life. And let’s be honest…did it seem like Jesus was having a picnic discipling the twelve? Technology allows us a distance where we don’t really have to get dirty ourselves. We hope to get the same results while never really putting ourselves out there. The problem is that it’s impossible to do mission and discipleship without getting dirty, without truly investing yourself. We think innovating technology is easier. Well, it might be easier, but it definitely doesn’t get what Jesus wanted: missional disciples.
2. Technology is always trendy and sparkly. Real discipleship and mission almost never is. It’s fun to do things that look flashy at the end. Technology will always be fun and sexy because it’s never going to get old…you just keep innovating. The Commodore computer was as enchanting in its’ day as the ipad is today. The atari was its’ generations PS3. We now have apps for everything and love them. And 20 years from now it will be something else that is just as exciting. But true discipleship and mission never really has a shiny luster, does it? And while we can innovate it to some extent, it will always be life on life, day in day out and messy. Just like it was for Jesus. Innovating technology is just more fun and appealing.
3. We can learn to innovate technology faster than we can learn to disciple people well. You give me one month and a HTML 5 for Dummies book and I can probably build you a pretty good website. But that’s never the case in making disciples. It takes commitment. You have to be in it for the long haul.
4. Many church leaders have never been discipled themselves. It’s at this point that we reach the apex of the problem. Would you want me innovating dental practices if I’ve never been a dentist? Would you want me to innovate your carbon combustion engine if I’d never taken a machine class? In the same way, so many leaders in the church aren’t able to innovate the things that Jesus asked us to do with his last breath (Make disciples) because we’ve never been discipled ourselves. We have a lot of people who have been trained to build and grow the organization of the church…but not people who can disciple people who will disciple people who will disciple people…

Wanted: SOCIAL MEDIA INTERN

3DM is hiring for a one year, Social Media internship. If you are a recent college graduate  and are interested in exposure to digital marketing and messaging, helping us pioneer and innovate through various digital platforms, this internship might be for you. You’d be helping to research, shape and execute a digital media plan, working day-to-day and on the ground with a marketing exec from the top ad agency in the United States. There isn’t a lot of money involved, but it’s a foot in the door.

If you’re interested, you can find more details by clicking here, as well as what you’ll need to apply.