Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing video from our Cultivate Online Training . In the first video, John Burke, the founder of ELI and pastor of Gateway Church in Austin shares the the first mark of a church out of the culture.
I had a Christian inferiority complex in the sense that I knew what people thought of Christians and I was a little bit embarrassed to be one because of that association. And so as a result I think I wasn’t myself – comfortable with myself and with the life I was starting to experience since following Jesus and I hadn’t fully realized that what God does inside of you when you really live for him is what everyone is longing for. Maybe that is part of the problem. Maybe part of the problem is that many Christians don’t know how to truly follow Jesus in a moment-by-moment way where he is doing something in us that is so exciting that you want to give it away. It’s like, I love soccer and if you talk with me for very long I’m going to end up telling you about a soccer game or coaching my team or something – you know why? Because I love it and I think you ought to too. You might not, but I just so excited about it that in time I just can’t help talking about it. And you know honestly it is the same way with Jesus when you’re fully yielded to him and learning to do what he said in John 15, stay connected moment by moment and this fruit starts to grow and that is something that when you’re experiencing it, you want everyone to experience. I think that is what we need to get to – am I living the kind of life where I’m seeing the fruit of God’s Spirit produced in me, if so then I’m going to want others to experience it and I’m going to be less worried about what they think about me because I’m going to be more wanting them to have something good. That’s a shift that we as followers of Christ have to come to and help others live out – that’s contagious.
Keith and Kara Kirkpatrick are leading Journey in Bend. We caught up with them last week at Vault in Las Vegas and asked about the rewards and challenges of starting a new church out of the culture.
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.