"Sure, I'll lead the youth retreat in Upstate New York in the middle of February", I said.
And thus I sealed my fate.
The good news is that several days ago the forecast temperature was a high of -6 and a low of -20, so it appears that those numbers have increased. It's going to be downright balmy at 7.
“So, if we read (or preach) the Bible asking first, “What would Jesus do?” instead of asking “What has Jesus done” we’ll miss the good news that alone can set us free. Evangelicals desperately need to recover the truth that the overwhelming focus of the Bible is not the work of the redeemed but the work of the Redeemer. This means that the Bible is not first a recipe book for Christian living, but a revelation book of Jesus who is the answer to our unchristian living.”
The second time I've come across WWJD this week, and thankfully, the same result. Stop it.
Annual "Christian" events are tough when you are a preacher. Christmas, Easter, Good Friday...everyone knows what you are going to preach on.
I remember one Easter Sunday back when I was a kid when the Pastor preached on something from the Heidelberg Catechism. My mom was ticked. Jesus rises to life and we open the dead catechism.
In any event, it also means that I spend more time thinking about the events themselves. What is fresh to me this year? What is new that I can share?
Our advent series in 2014 is called "the Canvas". The idea is that our lives are a canvas upon which and through which God is going to paint the story of salvation. He is going to use our very lives to demonstrate to the world what life in his Kingdom looks like; what faith looks like. I'm beginning to notice a theme as I consider the four topics of advent–hope, peace, joy, and love–and it's not necessarily an encouraging one. The theme that these traits have in common is that they require a corollary to truly be seen.
That is, if God's going to paint a picture of Hope on the canvas of your life, he's almost always going to do it by walking you through a period that would otherwise be hopeless. You have to need something or desire something to have hope. And it can't be something that is easily attainable. It's almost always something that is out of reach. "Who hopes for what he already has?", asks Paul in Romans 8. If you already had it, it wouldn't be hope. Which means that if Hope is going to be painted on your canvas, it's probably going to require that other things are stripped away. Most of that stripped-away-stuff is related to false hope; it's the stuff that might fool us into believing that something else can save us. Our money, our relationships, our comfort, our health, or whatever. When all of that is gone, why does the Christian still have hope? Because our hope is not in the temporary or the fading, but in the unchanging and unfading and unfailing God of the universe. Hope usually requires calamity if it is to be clearly seen.
Peace requires turmoil.
Joy requires trial.
Love requires the unloveable; it's seen most clearly when we love our enemies.
But then salvation requires a baby and forgiveness requires a cross and life requires death.
The Lion Aslan told Lucy and Susan that when a willing victim took on the death of another, the stone table would be cracked (the law) and death itself would begin to work backwards. I guess that's our story now. Everything is being reversed. The curse is being re-written into blessing.
Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love share another common bond, though. When you really have them, you wouldn't trade them for all that you have lost. Calamity, turmoil, trial, enemies. They are worth enduring if in the end you have Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love. We'd love to have each of them without their corollary, of course, and someday we will (with the exception of hope! Someday, our hope will be fulfilled and will be no more.) Until the day we have perfect Peace, Joy, and Love, however, more often than not the way they will become evident in our lives is when they are held up against their alternative. The Christian's Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love, are all more powerful than the forces that work against them, because they are rooted in the goodness of God himself.
That's the promise of the good news.
“If something happens to me, these all become autonomous churches and lead pastors become primary teaching pastors. So the whole thing is built for me to back out.”
Several years ago I watched a recorded conversation between Mark Dever, James MacDonald, and Mark Driscoll in which Mark Dever asked Mark Driscoll what the plan was if he were to ever leave the church that he founded, Mars Hill. (I think the question may have been "what happens when you die?") The question was about leadership succession; not so much what would they do if Mark got hit by a bus, but what Mark would do when he was getting ready to retire.
His response was that, when he left, all of the campuses of Mars Hill would become independent, autonomous congregations. He was confident that they had appropriate leadership at each campus who could carry the mantle, even if he were to go away.
One of the questions I've often considered in pondering the multi-site church movement is what happens when the lead preacher moves on. As far as I know, we're still in the "first generation" of Pastor's of video based multi-sites. These multi-sites have been built on the recognition that they have a particularly gifted preacher, and that it makes more sense for the mission of the church to attempt to replicate the preacher via video. In some cases, there is more to it, but there is never less. I haven't heard of any video-based multi-site churches with a boring preacher.
To be clear, I don't necessarily think there is anything wrong with that. We must be willing to admit, though, that the risk of a personality cult is extremely high. Without careful succession plans, you are either setting the church up for disaster or you are setting the next preacher up for disaster, and probably both.
Mark's answer to the question struck me because of it's honesty. It was a tacit suggestion that no one else could do what he does. No one could be the "next Mark Driscoll". No one could fill Mark Driscoll's pulpit. No one could carry on the banner, even in the best of circumstances, when he presumably had time and opportunity to train a replacement as he approached retirement. Of course, that's precisely the reason that the question of what you do when the lead guy leaves looms so large.
The truth is that all churches, large or small, go through a similar difficult transition when a long-term, loved, and gifted pastor retires or leaves. I know a church who had a well-known, well-spoken pastor for years, and even though he retired nearly two decades ago, and they are on their second pastor since then, he is still revered as the one who was there during the golden years. The church has been shrinking ever since he left. The point is, it's not just large churches who have a difficult–if not impossible–time replacing the leader. The difference is in the magnitude of the problem.
The larger a church gets, particularly when it gets large under a single leader, the harder it's going to be to find someone with the ability and the skill set to "take over". And again, that's in the best of circumstances. Let alone when someone leaves suddenly.
Unfortunately for Driscoll, he was hit by the proverbial bus in the form of endless allegations and a little bit of his own unraveling. Regardless of how much of it was justified (and who are any of us to say, unless we were there?), the fact remains that by the time things were said and done he felt like the best thing to do was to walk away. So he did.
Fortunately for Driscoll, he had put a contingency plan in place at Mars Hill, and it looks like they pulled the rip chord on it. The last major act of leadership at the church (barring building sales, etc.) is that all of the campuses have an opportunity to become independent, autonomous congregations. Because no one can do what Mark did, and maybe no one should even try.
“It took Jesus about two seconds to become a human. It took him around 30 years to become a Galilean.”
I was at a fundraising banquet for a non-profit where I serve on the board (New Hope Community Ministries. Check it out: http://www.newhopecmnj.org) when the guest speaker dropped the bomb quoted above. I've been processing it for the past week.
When I arrived in North Jersey and at Restore, I had a lot of thoughts about church planting that turned out to be mostly wrong. It's not that they were incorrect, per se, it's just that they didn't fit the context that I was planting in.
North Jersey isn't like the other contexts that I've been in. It's faster-paced than Miami, but much more community-centric than upstate New York and the capital region. It's a delightful blend of fast-paced-cut-your-throat-to-get-ahead New York City and old-timey New England, where if we don't know you and you didn't grow up in this here town, we don't trust you. It's not exactly either of those things, but it has elements of both. It's regional, but it's not. We commute to work, then come home, park our cars, and walk to the park. My town is better than yours. Welcome to North Jersey.
I remember hearing about a dude who was planting a church in New York City and for the first year, when people asked him what he was doing, he said something to the effect of, "learning the people." He may as well have said, "becoming a New Yorker". That's what he was doing, and he was right for doing it.
At the time the comment struck me as somewhat silly–again, not because he was wrong–but because it seemed like a waste of time. It seemed to me like a better approach would have been to take a person who was already a New Yorker and have them plant a church in New York. At least it would have been more efficient. Of course, raising up indigenous leaders is (or should be) the long term goal of every church planter in New York and elsewhere. But unless that is happening already, or until it does, a church planter is going to need to take some time to learn the context if we are going to preach the Gospel well.
The good news about the good news is that it doesn't stop being good, no matter what context you are in. But, if you want to make sure that the people you are preaching to hear it as good news, you better learn to express it in a language that they can understand, addressing the real needs that they already know that they have, or setting them free from the real bondage they already experience. And that requires becoming one of them. Like Jesus became a Galilean.
