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Start with the end in mind
Tim and Melissa Heerebout our native Canadians with a heart for their country’s largest and most influential city – Toronto. They moved into the urban center last summer hoping God would use them to start a new church in and for the city. You can follow their journey at http://www.luvisaverb.com/.
A little more than two years ago my wife and I had our first child. The best piece of parenting advice we’ve gotten, and you get a lot when you’re pregnant, was this: start with the end in mind. I’ve found this tiny phrase to have huge application in my thought processes in birthing a new faith community.
It seems to me that most church planters want to reach the people around them. They want a church that reflects a culture that is indigenous to their town. However, rather than starting by identifying with and becoming a part of that culture from the outset, the default starting position tends to be to bring church culture to the table. We assume church needs to look like, well, church. It doesn’t seem like we’re starting with the end in mind.
With that on our hearts, our approach has been different. Our first move is not to bring church to Toronto. It’s to bring love; to serve and bring energy into our local culture. We’ve launched an organization called Voxtropolis that seeks only the good of the city and places us squarely in the midst of culture creation as artists and promoters who leverage our talents for social justice. It is not, and I can’t stress this enough, and will never be a church. Even so, it’s doing remarkable good and placing us squarely in the middle of Toronto’s creative community as people of value, impact and influence.
In doing so our web of relationships has grown amazingly. In just four months we were able to organize a team of 11 volunteers and almost a dozen artists to host an event for more than 100 people. We raised $760 for Habitat for Humanity. The majority of the people there weren’t believers.
Starting this way is giving us keen insight into the heart of Toronto. It’s showing us how God is already moving. It’s providing a web of relationships we’d otherwise never have. We’ve started in the culture, for the culture, so that we can plant out of the culture. I look around at our events and think “this is what I want our faith community to feel like”. There was something strangely familiar about that feeling; like I was a proud father holding a newborn again. It will take time, maybe a long time, but I can’t help but believe that starting with the end in mind isn’t giving us an edge towards success.
Messy Church
This is really the biggest problem in the church today that we have a certain view of church as certain people who sit in certain seats on a certain day of the week and they act a certain way. As a result, we aren’t really willing to let it get messy. We’re not willing for there to be a blurring of distinction about where people are interacting and you might not really know if this person is following Christ or not.
There is a certain amount of mess to that, in other words, there was a real mess, Jesus saying to Zaccheus, I want to stay at your house tonight,. It caused this huge stir. Why? Because Zaccheus was way far from being the typical type that would be associated with a good religious person or even following God. He was stealing from people. He was like the gang leader of the city. He was knocking people off probably to make more money, but something about Jesus attracted him and Jesus saw it and saw that God was at work behind the scenes with him – I’m going to move in close. That created a mess. The religious people didn’t like it. Zaccheus invites all his friends who seemed very far God and yet Jesus enters into that very comfortable in his own skin, confident that God is already here at work and is doing something and he’s going to bring it out. He is going to make something beautiful out of what seems messy.
Unless the church is willing to enter into that place we will not see God make something beautiful out of the mess of life. And if we think that the way God does things is to make things look neat on the outside, then we’re falling into the trap of the Pharisees. We’ve got to be willing to enter in to the mess of the culture and allow God to do something beautiful in it.
Are Your Friends Becoming the Church?
Especially for Christian leaders, if our friends are not becoming the church then there is something wrong. There is either something wrong with the way we are following Christ or there is something wrong with the way we are doing church, but church is to be the representation of Jesus himself in the world. That’s what Jesus said, that we his body, his hands and feet. He is the head. So when we look at Jesus’ ministry he actually was not that, the religious people were actually pretty turned off by him but who were attracted to Jesus were the average people who had gotten themselves in all kinds of moral messes, financial messes, they were partying, they were screwing up sexually and yet for some reason they were attracted to him. That’s why the religious leaders said, they had a derogatory term for Jesus, they called him “the friend of sinners”. Well if we who are supposedly following Christ and becoming his body as we follow him together are not seeing the same kind of impact in the world around us where people are gravitating toward following Jesus because there is something life giving about him, then we are not representing him well. So we’ve got to change something – either the way we are following Christ or the way we are doing church or the way we are engaging with our friends and neighbors.
What’s love got to do with it?
Guest Blogger: Matt Jeffreys
In May of 2008 Matt and his wife Sharon moved their family to Temecula to start a church for people far away from God. Today, Ridgeline is full of people finding faith and many who have begun to discover what it means to love God and love people. You can follow his blog at http://www.iamridgeline.com/matts-blog/
I saw a car today with about a dozen Christian stickers on it. Actually, stickers can’t be “Christian”…only people can, but you know what I’m talking about. Anyway, the back of this car was full of them, and several were just ridiculous. I thought more about what it really means to be Christian…what it means to be a follower of Christ.
I believe at the very core, it’s about love. It doesn’t seem like that’s the accepted understanding though. For too long the church has been fixated on the externals. You need to dress a certain way, act a certain way, vote a certain way.
You can almost hear church-goers ask… What’s love got to do with it?
You need to listen to a certain kind of music, only hang out with people who are “already convinced,” put your kids in Christian schools, read only a specific translation of the bible, and on and on it goes…
What’s love got to do with it?
I think we’ve lost the way. I think we’re asking the wrong questions, or more often, not asking questions at all. Jesus said, when asked by a few religious dudes which commandment was most important to God, “love God with ALL you are, and the second is tied directly to it, love those around you like you love yourself.” Jesus said if you can do these two things, you will fulfill all that God desires! Jesus also said that it was by the unique love we have for each other that the world would know we are indeed followers of Jesus.
What’s love got to do with it? EVERYTHING!
Ridgers, we may come up short in some areas, but we better not be found lacking in love! We’re gonna love those around us, those we come in contact with daily, and those God brings to Ridgeline. Republican or democrat, conservative or liberal, educated or uneducated, heterosexual or homosexual, under-resourced or over-resourced, black or white, we’re going to love. We’re going to love because God loves. We’re going to love because love changes hearts. We’re going to love because God loved us first. We’re going to love because it shows we really are followers of Jesus Christ.
It ain’t about stickers, or clothes, or music, or political affiliation. It’s about love. So let’s bring it!
See ya on the streets…