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.

Why the Resurrection Matters

Another Easter Sunday has come and gone and with it, the temptation to let the "Resurrection" fade into the background much the same as Christmas fades into the past and we are left paying off our credit cards from over-celebration. We don't celebrate in the same fashion for Easter. Despite the attempts to commercialize it with the Easter Bunny, new outfits, and candy, it still remains primarily a religious holiday that isn't recognized by people other than those who identify with Christianity. Yet the temptation to move on with our lives and compartmentalize the truths of the resurrection is just as much of a temptation as it is to throw out the wrapping paper and mentally move on to the next big event.

Easter is fundamentally different than Christmas, however. While the events of Christmas are incredibly important and contain a great deal of doctrinal truth, they don't stand on the same level as the events of Easter. In fact, the events of Christmas have no value whatsoever apart from Easter, since the death and resurrection of Jesus are the culmination of everything that he came to accomplish. If they never occurred, then his birth, life, and whatever else occurred would still have been interesting, miraculous, potentially life-altering even if we chose to use Christ's life as an example, but not near as important as they are because of the events of Easter weekend. I'm not sure if the importance of the resurrection can be overstated: if it doesn't happen, there is no hope, there is no ultimate salvation, and practically there is no foundation for the church. The first two points are theological in nature and I won't address them here. It is that last point–the practical necessity of the resurrection for the church–that I want to address.

As we examine the broader culture (at least of America) it's easy to notice that there are some very sharp disagreements regarding how we view various cultural issues. Pick any issue you'd like, and chances are you can find not just diverse views on the subject, but polarizing views. Our tendency is to believe that these disagreements are themselves the problem, but they aren't. They are a symptom of the problem. The real problem, as it turns out, is that we are standing on fundamentally different foundations.

Imagine that the two of us were standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, and we began to describe to one another what we see. To a certain extent, our descriptions may seem similar. We might describe a deep gorge, the relative color of the dirt and clay, the vastness of what we are viewing. As we go further in our descriptions, however, they inevitably begin to diverge. One of us argues that the canyon is a thousand feet deep, the other says it is only a couple of hundred feet. Perhaps we argue about the vegetation, or what it is that makes it so beautiful, or how the sun sets–or rises–on the opposite end of the canyon. Soon we would find that our disagreement is so sharp, that it is impossible for us to figure one another out. We end up completely polarized, convinced that the other person is a lunatic.

Of course you may have already figured out the problem. We are viewing the same canyon, but from two different vantage points. Where we are standing makes all the difference in recognizing why it is that we disagree on our perspective. Once we understand that we are not even fundamentally seeing the same things, we can come to terms with the fact that we disagree.

This is why the real issues of culture have nothing to do with our perspectives on the issues, and have everything to do with the foundation on which we are standing. Christians in particular have taken for granted that for the vast majority of the history of the United States, most of the population stood on a similar foundation. Call it "Judeo-Christian values" or whatever you wish, but really it was just the foundation that there was a God and that we could find out more about him in the Bible. I don't assume that the entirety of the country was Christian, let alone religious, but at very least the foundation was roughly similar. Thus, if there were disagreements on certain subjects, they weren't extreme. We might be arguing about the color of the clay in the canyon, but at least we are looking at the same clay.

Unfortunately that foundation has shifted and the vast majority of culture is no longer standing on the same foundation. This is the effect of post-modernity that claims that there are no universal truths. One of the impacts of this was the supposed destruction of the meta-narrative, which is by it's nature a comprehensive truth claim. Of course the theory falls on it's head. Even saying that there is no universal truth is a comprehensive truth claim about how the world works, it simply shifts the responsibility for decision making to the individual, rather than the universal. Again, claiming that every decision is up to the individual is a universal claim. Thus the meta-narrative was not done away with, but simply changed, and as a result, we find that when we are describing what appear to be similar issues, they are not the same at all. Those of us who are Christians are standing on an entirely different foundation than those who are not-Christians, and vice versa.

This in itself is not a bad thing, it is just something that simply "is". If anything, it provides an opportunity for Christians to have more clarity about what it is that they actually believe. I also think that it should provide Christians more opportunity to have grace with skeptics, since we ought to understand that the issues is not a disagreement, per se, it is a foundational issue. We are not standing on the same footing. We aren't looking at the canyon from the same angle. I can't expect my skeptic friend to see the world from the same perspective that I do, unless we first understand where it is that we are standing.

All of this brings me back to the church, and my original point about the practical need to remember the resurrection. Over the past decade, at least, and perhaps longer than that, post-modernity has come into the church in a variety of ways. The easiest entry way has been to offer differing perspectives on traditional Christian perspectives. Some of those perspectives have been healthy and offered appropriate correctives in the church. Like all institutions (and individuals, I might add), when you have held onto a particular belief long enough, you typically end up abusing it in it's application. For example, the longer you believe you are a safe driver, the less likely you are to use your seat belt. The better you are at a particular activity–skiing, for example–the more likely you are to push the limits verging into the unsafe, even for an expert. The same goes for churches. What might begin as a helpful doctrine or tradition can end up being abused in the long run, in desperate need of correction and a reminder of where the application should begin and end. Other perspectives, however, have not been corrective in nature, but downright incorrect. As a seminary professor said, "the only corrective to bad theology is better theology." Unfortunately many of the critiques in the last decade have not been better theology, but just more bad theology from a different perspective. The pendulum might swing to embrace it, but it doesn't mean that we are any better off. Change for changes sake is not necessarily a good thing. So how do we combat these perspectives? The answer is the resurrection.

The resurrection provides Christians with the foundation on which unity can be built as a church, for at least two reasons. The first reason encompasses both Jesus death, and resurrection, which puts all Christians on the same plane. If Jesus death and resurrection are real, historical events that happened and on which Christianity is based, so that faith and confidence in those events is essential to being a Christian, then the very nature of them mean that all of us arrive into this new kingdom of God on the same train. No one gets in on their own power. No one is more righteous than another. In fact, we all have the same righteousness from the same savior and get in on the same ticket.

The second reason that the resurrection is necessary is that it proves that Jesus is the king of this new kingdom, and thus, he gets to set the expectations. I believe that one of the chief reasons that some of the sharp disagreements that the church has experienced with the culture have become sharp disagreements within the church itself is that many within the church have unwittingly shifted their foundation. This was more evident than ever in the week leading up to Easter when a variety of articles were published claiming to come from Christian sources, but as I examined them, I noticed that they weren't Christian at all. They claimed to have a similar value structure, but they so minimized the death and resurrection of Jesus that those two events were no longer the foundation on which they based the rest of their so-called "truth". Realizing that meant that I could accept their conclusions at face value–as the author's opinion–but also realize that they weren't Christian perspectives, even though they claimed to be. It has become increasingly easy for people in the 21st century church to disagree with Jesus, or try to change his words to fit our meaning, and the reason that we can do it is because we, essentially, deny the power of the resurrection or take it to mean something it doesn't mean. The resurrection is not hope just for hope's sake; it is hope because it revealed that Jesus really was who he said he was. Jesus really was God incarnate who had the ability to defeat death on our behalf. The power of the resurrection wasn't limited just to him; it's a power that all who put their faith in Christ have access to. Far from being just some nebulous, ill-defined hope, it is a hope that very clearly identifies Jesus as God of very God, and King of every King. In other words, if we believe the resurrection is true, we don't get to disagree with Jesus.

As believers, then, the starting point for our unity must be the resurrection of Jesus. This is what gives him His claim to authority, as well as clarifying for us why we don't get to be authoritative in our own right. The Resurrection is the foundation on which the Christian views the rest of the world. When we stand on the power of the Resurrection, then we may still discuss and dialogue about what, exactly, Christ believed, but we don't get to disagree with Jesus or the rest of the Bible, or interpret it to fit our cultural milieu or cultural understanding at the time. Rather we stand on the authority of Christ himself.

If there are sharp disagreements in the church, I am much less interested in knowing what you think about the disagreement, and much more interested in knowing what you think about Jesus. Is he the risen Lord, or not? If he is, then you and I can both submit our opinions to his. If he isn't, then we're not on the same foundation to begin with, and I don't care much that you disagree with me. We'll never agree on what the canyon looks like so long as we are standing on different lookouts.

This is why we can't put Easter in the past. Easter Sunday, and what it represents, are not just a day in the life of the church calendar, but the foundation on which every day must be built. To the extent that we remember that, we'll have a united church. To the extend that we forget it, we'll be divided. It might really be as simple as that.

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.

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 Fallacy of a Dying Church

Here is some language that we should stop using: "dying church".

Let's get this straight: the church of Jesus Christ is always alive. Let's not lose focus on what the church is. It is the gathered body of people made alive through faith in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is a work that is compelled by and empowered by God through his Holy Spirit. The very definition of the church cannot be extricated from life itself; if it is, you no longer have the church.

So why do we call churches that are in decline "dying churches"? It stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the church. Our problem is that we too closely associate the church of Jesus Christ with our local church, assuming that the two are one-and-the-same. While the church-local is built on and a part of the universal church of Jesus Christ, it nevertheless contains a wide variety of human elements, both cultural and systemic. Life, for those portions, is no guarantee. In fact, if there is a guarantee, it is that at some point in the future, both our systems and our cultural expression will become irrelevant, and thus, highly susceptible to collapse.

The first step is to make the distinction between those elements of the church that are "man-made" in their origin, and those that are "divine" in their origin. Only when we do that will we become comfortable with the changes that are necessary in the human realm, while holding fast to the life-giving elements of the church, which is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

What I've seen is that many churches, in an effort to simply survive, will sacrifice the Gospel or the advance of the Gospel for the sake of the local church. While they may desire to grow and be "healthy", it is only trumped by their desire to make sure things can continue to be done the way they've always been done. Change is scary; risk is scarier. If we change, we risk making a mistake that will ultimately destroy "everything we've created" (see the problem?); if we don't change, not only do we remain comfortable but we mitigate the risk. If there is any risk, it's far enough down the road that we're not worried about it.

Incidentally, this is why most organizations that ultimately close their doors are on the path to closure long before they think they are. Organizations grow, stabilize, and then plateau. It's in that plateau period where the choice is often made to remain in a state of comfort and not "rock the boat"; unfortunately, that's usually the first step towards a long, slow, steady decline that won't be evident until the gentle slope has turned into a cliff and there is almost no turning back.

The good news for the church is that we aren't, or shouldn't be, afraid of organizational collapse. We're not selling a product that needs to be revamped, lest we lose our lifeline. We're preaching an unchanging Gospel that is our lifeline. When we wrap our heads around that, and realize that the lifeblood of the church goes on and on and on and grows and grows and grows no matter what happens to our little expression of the church, we become much more open to letting go of the human elements of the local church and living in the comfort and grace of the Gospel.

The church is not dead, she is alive! That's the confidence we have in the Gospel. And that's the message we need to proclaim.

Potentially the Most Important book of 2014

Replant: How a Dying Church Can Grow Again

By Darrin Patrick, Mark DeVine

Buy on Amazon

Still two months out and I already pre-ordered my copy.

I'm convinced that churches don't have to "die". Not if that means putting a for sale sign out in front of the building, anyway. But then it depends on your vision of "life".

If the life of your church is something you create, or something you "had back in the golden years", then yeah, maybe your church needs to die. The hard truth is that if the "life" of your church doesn't stem from Jesus, then you're not a biblical church anyway.

But if your vision of what "life" is in your church has to do with the life that's given by the Holy Spirit because of Jesus, then the truth is your church was never even dying to begin with. Maybe in need of a refocus, but still very much alive. You just have to recapture what that life means and looks like. Probably it means you have to return to your first love and identify your idols.

That refocus is going to require repentance, a willingness to move forward, some intense leadership hurdles, and a whole lot of the Holy Spirit. But it can happen.

I hate seeing for-sale signs on church lawns, and the unfortunate reality is that barring some changes, that's the future for most of the churches I know. I'm hoping this book helps stem that tide.