Infrastructure & Kingly Gifts

It's not sexy to talk about building or maintaining an infrastructure, but just try to change the world without one. - Seth Godin

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/10/infrastructure.html

In the A29 Network we talk about leaders as prophets, priests, and kings, based on the three offices of Jesus. (I'm not actually sure where this paradigm for leadership originated, but it's the only place I hear the language.) Every leader will be have a primary strength area, a secondary strength area, and then an area that they are weak.

Prophets are leaders who speak the truth. They cut through the confusion and clarify what it happening. They are visionaries.

Priests are leaders who love. They love the people around them, are compassionate, and make people feel cared for.

Kings are leaders who organize. They plan. They are strategic. They understand how seemingly disconnected parts work together and the implications of decisions.

Kings are the ones responsible for infrastructure, and as per the quote above, are typically the ones who get ignored (at least in church ministry). Their work happens in the background, and if they are really good at what they do, their work disappears. You never see it. You just experience it.

Take Apple: Steve Jobs was the prophetic leader. He had a vision. He was (apparently) often brash. He knew what he wanted. He got things done by the sheer force of his personality. He's the one who saw the iPhone in your hand before you even knew you wanted an iPhone.

Tim Cook, on the other hand, is a kingly leader. He organizes. He's the reason the thousands of little parts in your iPhone come together at just the right time, in just the right time frame, in just the right quantity, at just the right profit point, so that the iPhone that someone else envisioned actually ends up in your hand.

Steve Jobs (rightfully) got credit for his vision. Tim Cook (rarely, at least in the general public) gets the credit for almost certainly being the most effective kingly leader on the planet. His work disappears. We look at the phone in our hand and think, "amazing!" Rarely do we stop and think about what was required to make 13 million of them, ship them to multiple countries, and sell them all in three days, with enough stock remaining to do that again in a few weeks in nine more countries, then within three months to well over 100 countries. In fact, the only time you'd think about it is when there is a glitch in the system: when you show up to the Apple Store and they don't have exactly the model that you wanted in that exact moment.

The main problem is assuming you don't need the kingly gifts in your organization. That's what most churches do, in my experience. They love the priests (how could you not? They are so caring!). They love the prophets (they give good sermons!). Kings aren't even on the radar, even though organizations are simply not effective unless there is someone without the kingly gifts in a high level of leadership. That's why many church organizations remain small. You can't get anywhere unless you have an infrastructure that actually allows for the ideas you have to come to fruition, and the people you have to be organized into a meaningful movement.

Speculating on Jesus: Reliable Sources?

The final challenge that might be presented in light of the recent survey previously referenced is the challenge of whether or not the source material of Jesus life is to be trusted. By way of reminder, the survey indicated that most Americans believe that Jesus was a historical person who existed, but the opinions about what he was actually like or who he actually was varied greatly. This means that for the modern American Christian, the chief concern is not proving that he was, but who he was. This means, first, that Jesus is someone that we should care about beyond the typical historical figure. Second, it means that we need to know where to look to find out more information about him. And then finally, we need to determine whether that source material can be trusted.

As I mentioned in the last post, this third question is only posed when we realize that the source material about Jesus (his biographies) unashamedly present a man who believed that he was God. His claims were not just universal in nature, but they were actually universal truth claims about himself. If he really was God, if he really did do the things that he said, then it has tremendous implications for our life today. So much so, that if we can't rightly ignore what he said according to his biographers, then the next best thing to do is question the source altogether. Perhaps the accounts have been embellished. Perhaps, over time, the accounts have been changed to present a figure that said more than Jesus ever actually did.

This argument is quite easy to dispel, of course. Simply, if you were trying to soften the blow of Jesus' claims, or you were trying to make him more acceptable to the skeptic, you would have dialed down his claims, not ratcheted them up. In this case, Jesus' biographers would have made his words more offensive, more outlandish, and ultimately more crazy–unless they were true and he actually said them. We must keep in mind that it is recorded, extra-biblical, and fully accepted history that this group of people called Christians were being mercilessly persecuted by Rome, and particularly by the emperor Nero. Even if we wanted to make the highly unlikely and somewhat illogical argument that all of these early Christians were delusional, persecution that led to death certainly would have cleared out the insane from the sane. Instead of shrinking this group of people, however, it actually grew.

It's helpful to remember that these were first and second generation Christians who were being killed. Some of them may have been alive during Jesus ministry; most almost certainly had parents who were alive during that time. They faced this persecution precisely because they believed that the message of Jesus was true. He really did say what he said he did. He really was who he said he was. 

The Gospel writers fall into this group of people who, again, were first or second generation Christians. Three out of four definitely saw the ministry of Jesus. One of them, Luke, may not have, and perhaps that is what prompted his thoroughly researched biography that he claims to present to a person named Theophilus. Nevertheless, it behooved all of them to account for Jesus life as it actually happened. There was no benefit to making the story more than it was. They were already going to lose their lives on account of Jesus and who he was. Better to die for the real Jesus than someone they made up. Furthermore, the early church consistently verified these accounts of Jesus life as being accurate and truthful accounts of Jesus life.

All things being equal, a group that believed a known lie–and make no mistake but that the central moment of Jesus life, the resurrection, would have been a known lie were it not actually true–may have continued to propagate that truth so long as it led to pleasurable results. That is, assuming that the first disciples made up the outlandish story of Jesus rising from the dead, so long as it had pleasurable results the group might have just gone on propagating that story. What did it matter, so long as the results were good? Yet this is not what happened. While it did, for a time, produce pleasurable results, the fact is that the more one believed the message, and the more that one shared the message and lived out the implications to this truth, the less desirable the results became. If you really believed it, and you shared it, and you were obvious about the message of Jesus resurrection, you were threatened, arrested, and beaten, almost from the jump. If the resurrection–again, the single act that motivated the early church to advance–were not true, the disciples would have known that it wasn't true. At some point, someone would have cracked. At some point, a second or third generation follower would hear the story, not having seen the resurrection for themselves, and said, "this is crazy", and eventually the movement would have died. Of course, the other possibility is that the resurrection is not a lie at all, but an actual historical event that took place. Quite frankly, this is the direction that all of the notable information points. The movement really did happen. Cowards became courageous. The government and the religious leaders–two major powers who wanted nothing more than for this Jesus character to go away–never presented the body, despite knowing exactly where they put it because they guarded it with soldiers.

In the end, we might find that the message of Jesus' biographies, and the claims that he made about himself, are either outlandish or they are old fashioned. We may find that they are offensive. But none of these are the central question that we ought to ask. The question is, are they true? Did Jesus actually say and do these things? Are the Gospel accounts trustworthy? Given the historical context (not to mention the harmony of the four accounts), it seems that it would be more reasonable to ask why we wouldn't trust them. No one had anything to gain by fabricating these stories. The government didn't want to advance the message. The religious leaders never wanted to think about Jesus again. The Christians knew they would be killed for writing the things that they wrote. The only reason you'd write them is if they were, at the end of the day, actually the things that Jesus said and did, and if, at the end of the day, you were willing to stake your life on their truth. And that's exactly what the writers did.

Vision, Leadership, & Teamwork

I don't like meetings.

Actually, let me rephrase that.

I actually enjoy meetings. I just don't like what they do to people.

Meetings give the impression of valuable work, when nothing is actually getting done. They give the attendees the nspiration, but often that inspiration never generates into the perspiration required to actually accomplish the mission. 

Early on in our church planting adventure, there was a weekly (weekly!) meeting of leadership to discuss what was happening in the church and strategize for the future. Those meetings were never dull; it's one of the benefits of enjoying the company of the people you work with. Unfortunately it also gave the impression that a lot was getting done when in reality, almost everything we wanted to do was stuck in committee. A lot of good ideas were getting thrown out, but nothing was actually being done when the meeting was over.

That culture tends to attract the type of people who want to be in "leadership", but weren't leading anything, and in many cases, didn't want to lead anything. They just wanted to be at the meeting, because the perception was that this was where the "power" was generated. If they were at the meeting, they'd have input, and input equalled influence.

Someone said once that "culture eats strategy for lunch". That is, you can have the best strategy in the world, but your culture is going to be the dominant force that will ultimately dictate what you can get done. Anyone leading an organization knows how difficult it is to change the culture of the organization. Yet that's what we needed to do right from the get go. Meetings couldn't be the pinnacle or the destination of our work; they were more like the rest stop on the side of the highway.

Imagine your leadership team as a caravan of vehicles all headed towards a destination down the highway. A meeting is like the rest stop. They are necessary. Sometimes you need to make sure that the caravan of vehicles is all relatively close together so you didn't lose one another. It is good to catch up and make sure no one accidentally took an exit ramp since the last meeting, and make sure that no one is so far ahead that they aren't really a part of the caravan anymore.

Meeting based cultures are like the caravan that gets stuck at the rest-stop and keeps going inside to check the map. They may have the map memorized. They know where they've been, they know where they are, they know where they are going. But they never move.

We needed a leadership based culture. A leadership based culture is the caravan on the highway that only stops at rest-stops to make sure that the group was all still together, that they were all still headed in the same direction, and that no one was too far ahead or too far behind. In other words, the eal work gets done outside of the meeting. That was the cultural change. Unless you were doing work outside the meeting, you really didn't need to be at the meeting. If you weren't a part of the caravan, there was no need for you to stop and interface with us about the direction we were headed.

In any event, that change took some time, but now we have a leadership team that understands that the real work of ministry doesn't happen in the meeting. It happens in the nitty-gritty of daily relationships; the stuff that happens between the meetings. As our church has grown, that change in thinking becomes essential. Firstly, there is simply more ministry to be done. More people means more needs. The only way that those needs can be met is if you have leaders capable and passionate about their area of ministry. And secondly, the bigger the church and the more needs, the less time that I as the pastor have to dedicate to any one area. There is a divergence between my time and ability and the needs of the church. Other leaders need to step up.

Last night, we had our monthly ministry-leadership meeting, and I reminded them of three things that make the system work. Vision, Leadership, and Teamwork.

Vision means that we are all seeing the same thing. As the lead pastor, that falls on me to make sure that what I see is what we all see. In our case as a church, that means a radical and intense focus on visitors and new families who have been attending. This is necessary for us as more and more people join our church, but also necessary if we expect more and more people to join. We constantly need to be asking, "how does a new person view this thing?" "How does a new person feel about this?" "Does a visitor at Restore feel comfortable?" Each of us play a role in making sure that happens so that when a new person comes into Restore, they see the same thing wherever they turn or whatever leader they turn to. "This is a church who loves Jesus. This is a church who loves me."

Leadership means that we steward our position well. It means moving the ball forward. It means taking ownership. It means taking responsibility and having authority. it means stewarding our position well, so that if we ever have to turn it over to the next guy or gal, they can pick up where we left off. It means that we aren't just concerned with getting the job done now, but ensuring that we can get the job done months or years down the road when instead of 200 people we are dealing with 300 or 400. Have we been stewarding our influence and position in such a way that ministry can continue, even if we cannot?

Teamwork means understanding our position as part of a team. We are not lone rangers. We are not silos of ministry. Everything that we do impacts and affects someone else on the team or someone else in the church. If the team decides that we are going to use a particular church software to streamline our ministries and make them more efficient, it requires that everyone play their part in making that happen. For one person to be apathetic about it means that someone else will have to pick up the slack. We simply can't do our jobs alone; we need one another if we are going to have the healthiest church or organization possible.

I think one of the reasons that more churches don't move to a leadership-based culture and instead are comfortable with a meeting or committee-based culture is because a leadership-based culture requires trust in your ministry leaders. It requires you to give away authority and give them the authority that is commensurate with their responsibility. It requires you to let go of some stuff. It requires that you let people take risks and sometimes fail. It means not knowing what is going on at all times.

It's also freeing and it means that stuff gets done and the caravan keeps moving forward towards the same destination.

And every now and again, we get to stop at the rest area and stretch our legs, laugh, and have a quick meal before we head out again on the journey.

Cheat Sheet on Financial Giving

The topic of "how much am I supposed to give" has come up on more than one occasion in the past week. It got me thinking about how I respond in a variety of situations. The bottom line is that there is a lot of confusion out there around the type of generosity a Christian is called to. Some of it stems from poor theology, some of it stems from a bad experience with a church, some of it stems from hard hearts that want to believe that our money is our money and you better keep your hands off of it.

I'm not sure what it was for the guy sitting behind my wife while she waited for jury duty. "The church is just a business!" he expressed, apparently to whoever was listening. "They said that I had to give 10% of my gross income! All they wanted was my money." There wasn't any arguing with him, so Christi didn't intervene. Unfortunately, he's not alone in his confusion. Even seasoned Christians argue about whether we're supposed to give 10% of our gross or our net income. The problem is, we're arguing about the wrong thing.

What I'm going to do in this post is highlight some New Testament principles on giving. It's not a theological treatise (which you wouldn't read) or a proof-text of why I'm right and you're wrong (which would be ridiculous). It's just principles that can help us understand what God calls us to give, how he calls us to give it, and perhaps most important of all, the context in which we are called to give.

First, 10% is not mentioned as a giving standard in the New Testament.

On top of that, it's a bit of a misleading statement to say that 10% was the Old Testament norm. But before you start putting down your checkbooks and unregistering for your online giving in your unbridled enthusiasm, let me explain. A "tithe" means "10%", but in the Old Testament, but God's people were required to give two tithes and a third one every third year. So yes, 10% chunks. For a total of about 23% a year averaged over three years. In the New Testament, the old manner of supporting the temple and governance structure of the Kingdom-Temple paradigm was done away with, and giving in the New Testament was replaced with the language of "generosity". The principle all along, Old Testament included, was one of generosity. The law of 10% revealed that even God's people were incredibly stingy, and not very generous at all. The good news of Jesus, in which God himself leaves all the wealth of heaven to become a pauper and ultimately to die a cursed death on a cross for the gain of his people, should, in the end, break down our stinginess and burst forth into generosity.

Fast forward a few thousand years to the man's comment about "the church wanting 10% of my gross salary!" Why are we asking about whether or not God wants 10% of the net or the gross? It's rarely because we want to give away more. Usually it's because we want to make sure that we're meeting the bare minimum requirement, and how foolish would we be if we found out that we'd been giving based on our gross income when all God really required was 10% of our net. All that money, wasted!

(For the record, if you are GOING to use a percentage based giving system, you would use your gross salary, especially if you are going on an Old Testament-like principle. Your salary is what you earn pre-tax. The government bases your tax percentage on that salary. If you are basing your giving off some number, it's that one. Not after the government gets theres.)

Second, all that God's people have is given for the good of the kingdom of God. 

Period. This is true in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. God always operates through individuals for the good of communities. If you have been blessed with wealth, God did not bless you so that you alone would be blessed. He blessed you so that you would be a blessing to his community of people. Put another way, if God allows you to make one million dollars next year, the proper perspective is that God has given his church and his community of people one million dollars, and he has made you the steward.

Now plug in your salary.

Next year you are going to earn 65,000. The proper perspective, biblically speaking, is that God, through you, has given his community of people (his church) 65,000, and he has called you to manage that 65,000 dollars well.

Third, you give what you have, not what you do not have. 

When Paul appeals for money in the New Testament, he doesn't use percentages and he doesn't use dollar figures. He uses capacity as the measurement of generosity. What is your capacity for giving? Or, to ask it another way, how much has God given you to manage? All other things being equal, if you have a family of five and you make 65,000 a year, your capacity for giving is probably going to be significantly less than a family of five who makes 250,000.

If you took that scenario and judged based on percentages, say, 10% of gross income, you end up with one family looking somewhat generous and the other not looking that generous. Family one, making 65,000 dollars a year, would "only" have given 6,500. Family two, making 250,000 a year, would have given 25,000! How generous! Except that it's really not very generous at all, since they still have significantly more money leftover to spend on themselves. Neither the dollar value nor the percentage are an accurate reflection of true generosity. (Remember Jesus story of the woman who gave her last two coins? That was more generous than someone who gave 100 coins our of their wealth.)

GENEROSITY

So let's assume that we understand the Gospel, that Jesus literally gives up everything for the sake of his people, the church. Jesus does what the law could never do. He actually frees us from condemnation so that, instead of attempting (and failing) to follow the law to the letter, we are free to live in the spirit of the law. It's not just that the Christian doesn't murder; in the kingdom of God we don't even have hate in our hearts. It's not just that the Christian doesn't commit adultery; in the Kingdom of God we don't even look at a woman lustfully. At least, this is the ideal. It's not the letter of the law, it's the spirit of the law that was the most important thing. What the law, in it's letter, revealed to us, was how far we fall short of the spirit of the law and how much we need Jesus. (We couldn't even give 10%, let alone actually have glad and generous hearts!) And now that Jesus has come, and has transformed our hearts, so our hearts, more and more, daily and progressively, are in tune with the spirit of the law which is the spirit of God.

So here's what generosity requires.

First, it requires that we understand the Gospel. You can't just ecide to be generous. Maybe by the world's standards you can, but not by God's. Generosity is a heart issue. It's giving with gladness. And that only happens when we understand the transforming power of the Gospel.

Second, it requires that we understand what God requires. Answer: everything. It's not yours to begin with. It's his. You are called to be a steward of it for the good of his Kingdom.

Third, it requires that we understand our capacity. Not everyone can give the same amount, but I know from experience that most people assume they are on the lower end of the scale rather than the higher end, and they are almost always wrong. My guess (and a fairly educated one) is that most of us could give substantially more than we are currently giving. The only way to know, however, is to have a realistic perspective on our capacity.

Here's the thing: it requires money to live. That's reality. We have a job and earn money for two reasons: first, to provide for ourselves and our family, and second, so that we can give money away. God ants you to provide for your family, and he does not want you to go into debt so you can give. You must take a realistic assessment of what it requires for you to provide for your family, and recognize that you will only have a certain capacity for giving. 

In the example above, one family of five found out that they could live on 57,500/year, because that's what they had after giving to the church. The other family was living on 225,000/year. Why the discrepancy?

Let me be clear: Jesus was not a socialist and the New Testament church was not a socialist utopia. Anyone who argues that has an agenda and they are being ridiculous. There were wealthy people in the church and poor people in the church and some of them owned mansions and others were servants in someone else's home. Yet each of them was called to give what they could, according to their capacity. The system worked because the Holy Spirit had moved in people's hearts to such a degree that everyone wanted to give whatever it was that they had to give. Some gave more and some gave less. But all gave according to the same spirit. That is generosity.

We don't all have to drive white Honda accords and wear one-piece silver v-neck jumpsuits. We don't all have to have the same size house on the same kind of street with the same length driveway. The lower-income person can rob themselves of their capacity for giving by buying the most expensive cell-phone, and the higher-income person can rob themselves of their capacity by buying the biggest house on the block. It's okay to have differing levels of income, it's not okay to fool yourselves into thinking that you don't have more capacity for giving.

(And for the record, lower income people in the American church give a substantially higher percentage of their income than higher income people. The statistics for actual dollar amount given per household look a little better, mostly because there are some people who give massive dollar amounts that bump up the average.)

Here is how you will know that you are striking the right balance between what you need and what you are giving: when you look at your bills, and think, "I genuinely wish I could give more", you've probably got a good balance, and quite frankly, it will motivate you towards good financial stewardship. If you think, "thank God I don't have to give more" or "there's no way I could give more" or "I'm giving plenty as it is", you've got some heart work to do.

None of us are perfect, and we're not going to get there tomorrow. I'm just saying that if we're more concerned about what we have to give away than we are with what we get to keep for ourselves, we've probably got the wrong perspective. Whatever you have is given to you to steward for the good of the community around you. It doesn't always feel good, but that's when we need the Holy Spirit to change our hearts. Overtime, slowly but surely, he'll turn us into a generous people after all.

Feel Good Faith and Thin Christianity

Most of life happens on a pendulum. I don't mean life as in the living and breathing essence of who we are, but I mean life, generally. Our worldview, our culture, and societies values.

A couple of things came up yesterday that started me thinking about this. The first was that a basketball player at a Division 1 college quit the school and will be transferring next year or as soon as possible. He was a starting player, and he quit mid-way through the season. His rationale? From what I understand (this was second hand delivered to me), the locker room was a disaster. Racism, drugs, alcohol abuse, sexuality, and on and on. Not that this kid was a prude. But at a certain point, it becomes too much.

I commented to the person telling me that this is what we can expect if we decide as a culture that value judgments can be made by the individual. What boundaries are we willing to set? Where are the lines that we draw? And then, on whose authority do we set them or draw them? It might be the institution itself (in this case, a University), it might be the government, or it might be something else, but at the end of the day someone has the authority to set the boundary points and effectively declare that this is as far as they are willing to go. As long as it is the individual, then functionally, we have declared that "no boundary marker" is the real boundary marker.

Setting it based on the authority of a human institution typically doesn't fare much better. This is precisely what causes the pendulum shifts in our culture. Most human institutions can be changed either by popular opinion, by uprising, by votes, or in many modern cases simply by the subjective opinion of appointed judges. If we don't like the boundary marker that a particular institution has set, there is typically some way to change it. And since most of us are not overly prone to moderation, our views tend to go from one extreme to the other. We go from prohibition to license in a few generations; give it a generation or two more, and we might see the pendulum swing back.

The other conversation I had related to Christianity in the first century. A friend is preaching on the book of Revelation; I am preaching on the book of Acts. A commentary on Acts that I was reading pointed out that the way to really understand Acts, or to really understand Revelation, was to read them together and see that they are talking about the same thing from different perspectives. Acts is the historical narrative; Revelation is the spiritual one. One of the descriptions is on this side of the curtain; the other describes what we cannot see, unless it's "revealed".

I shared it with my friend and he mentioned some of what he was reading in terms of the persecution of the early church and the heinous measures that the Romans would be willing to go to either in the name of sport or simply torture. It raised an important question for us to consider: how many people would still be in our churches if they knew that simply being there could get them killed? It was sobering to think about, not just for the people in the pews, but for ourselves. Would we be willing to endure brutal torture for the sake of Christ? We both believed we would, but mostly just hoped we'd never have to truly find out.

It strikes me that the Christian faith is almost always counter-cultural, and when it isn't, it suffers. I don't mean this in the way that it's typically presented, however. For example, it's easy to say that Christianity is counter-cultural when sexual promiscuity, for example, is celebrated. This is the way that we typically mean that Christianity should be counter-cultural. I'm suggesting that it should also be counter-cultural even when the values of culture appear to be in line with the values of Christianity. That is, Christianity is ultimately just as counter-cultural when it is sexual suppression that appears to be valued, as could be argued was the case in the mid-20th century, and two married people having the same bedroom was considered too risqué for TV. For one thing, sex is a gift that Christianity and the Bible celebrate. It's not embarrassing, it's good. That alone ought to have been a counter-cultural message during that time.

The real reason that the church is counter-cultural, though, is not because we agree or disagree with the values of the culture. Again, that's what we typically mean when we say we are counter-cultural, but that should be a secondary focus. Even if the values of culture appear to be in line with the values of Christianity, what remains counter-cultural is the authority by which we set our boundary markers. This is what keeps Christianity from functioning on the same pendulum cycle as the rest of culture. Our authority is unchanging; it doesn't change based on our feelings or what we think about it. Culture can appreciate our values or think that they are old-fashioned and silly, but what makes us counter-cultural is that we define our values based on God's ideals and not based on human institution or our own perceived moral compass.

It strikes me that when culture appears to agree with the church, the church is less interested in being counter-cultural, and more interested in figuring out how we can be "mainstream" with what we believe. We try to squeeze Jesus into our already relatively moral existence. Our churches begin to look like malls, our worship events look like concerts, we give away material goods to get people to enter, we give slick, well-presented "message" that showcase our public speaking ability rather than the Word of God, and we convince people that Jesus can take their mostly-good life and turn it into a really-good life. I don't want to impugn a whole generation of churches, and I am being intentionally cynical for a reason. It appears to me that the fruit that we're seeing in the Christian church in America at large begs the question: what authority does a Christian actually follow? And if that authority is an unchanging, sovereign God, then why does it appear that his opinion changes as frequently as ours?

Again, there is much good that has been done through churches that might consider themselves "seeker-sensitive" or whatever other Christian nomenclature you might want to use. I can't help but wonder, though, whether one significant downside is that as long as our worship services look like something that we produced, or come from our own minds, whether we're not just feeding into the same old story that authority is found in human institutions. And if it's found in human institutions, if the church's authority comes from the mind of the pastor or the Elders who happen to be in charge at the time, then it's no wonder that many churches will change as quick and as soon as culture. It's also no wonder that many Christians can't fathom that being a Christian might mean that you disagree with some of what culture values; they've never been taught that what makes us counter-cultural is not necessary what we do, it's who we follow.

Imagine if the church took seriously who God was, and then took seriously who we are called to be not based on our opinion or culture's opinion of us, but simply based on God's love for us. What would that look like? 

It would be a counter-cultural church that based it's authority on God, and didn't make their decisions based on what man thinks about them, but based on who God is and what he has done. That would be a revolutionary church indeed.

The Church is Simple

Going through the book of Acts in a sermon series has been a refreshing reminder of the life of the church. Inasmuch as everyone talks about wanting to "do church like the first century church", we usually don't hit the mark. I can't help but think that we are seriously overcomplicating it.

It seems like there are at least three things we can say, keeping things pretty simple.

First, the church is founded on Jesus Christ. For any Christian, that ought to be the obvious one. You don't have the church without Jesus.

Second, the church is powered by the Holy Spirit. This message is consistent throughout the life of Jesus and of course carries through in the book of Acts. Jesus talks about the coming Holy Spirit to the disciples and then prays for them in John 17 that they would be sent out into the world. The order is important. In Acts, Jesus tells them to wait until they have the Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit finally comes on the day of the first fruits of the harvest, the disciples receive the promised power and they go out and spread the message of the Gospel to massive response.

Third, the church is recognized by it's community. It seems to me that everything else that happens in the book of acts, and certainly the first description of the church in Acts 2, has this as it's center. The church restores bonds between people that were previously broken.

If I were to add a fourth, it would be that the church is sustained by it's prayers. I don't like the word "sustained", necessarily, because I think we are sustained by Jesus/the Holy Spirit but it's because of that sustenance that we ultimately pray. If the church recognized that we were totally dependent on Jesus work and the Spirit's power, we'd do a lot more praying. Prayer is one of the ways we activate the Spirit's work (activate here being used loosely; I don't intend to treat it like an on/off switch or something we can ultimately control.)

When we see what the church is doing, then, what we notice is that they are taking great care to remain on their foundation–that is, they are studying the Scripture that tells them about Jesus–they are continually seeking the Spirit–prayer–and they are doing all of this in community with one another. That community, in some cases, simply means that they have decided that doing life together is better than doing it apart. They hang out, they love one another, they want to be with one another, they weep with one another when necessary and laugh with one another when they can. They share amongst themselves. There isn't need in this community, because there would never be need in a family. And we are the family of God.

This is the fundamental essence of the church of Jesus Christ, who is bound together by Him and through him, and grows together into a family by the power of the Holy Spirit.

It's easy to miss the simplicity of what the church is called to be.