Sorry about Thursday’s bodiless post! Here is what I intended to post…

This is the seventh and final post of a mini-series on my emotional journey of leaving church-as-I-knew-it to become a missionary-as-a-way-of-life in Los Angeles.  To read previous posts, click below:

Something’s Crossed Over In Me – Intro.

Part 1A – Mildly Panicked: Missing my old trees.

Part 1B – Mildly Panicked: Naming my old trees.

Part 2A – Ravenous: Not on bread alone.

Part 2B – Ravenous: Feeding this hunger.

Part 3 – Wildly Free to be church at will. 

CONCLUSION

This ‘fast’ not coming to an end?

In Part 2 of this series I likened our missionary experience to fasting. Only instead of fasting from regular foods, those of us in Way of Life Village have been abstaining from several of our favorite and not-so-favorite ways of doing church for a year and a half. In other posts I’ve shared why this approach blesses the ones we’re reaching, but in this series I’ve shared how it is affecting me personally. This “fast” from Christian culture has messed with me. My emotions have run the gamut.

There is a difference between this fast and a true fast, though. In a real fast you eventually return to the things you’ve been abstaining from. You start consuming your old menu again, ideally with a deeper appreciation for God’s provision. But in this case I’m not sure that I’ll be going back to some, perhaps all, of the things I’ve been going without. This realization also messes with me. I don’t exactly relish the thought of perpetually venturing into the unknown and unfamiliar, but that’s a given part of discipleship to Jesus. And I do rejoice in the lessons I’m learning along the way and the part God is allowing us to play in his mission. Something’s crossed over in me, and I can’t go back.

A word of thanks to those on whose shoulders we stand

I still benefit from my interactions with churches who are embracing the Christian culture so prevalent in North America. We visit each other’s churches, support each other and learn from each other. None of us owns the corner of the market on joining God in mission. We need each other.

I’m thankful to the churches I came from. It is because of their love for the Lord that they have done and are still doing many wonderful things in Jesus’ name to bless the world. It is because of their love for Ed, Katie, Meredith and me that they taught us the joys of surrendering to King Jesus. And it is because of their love for others that they sent our two families away from their Christian culture to reach “those who would never come to us”.

It gives me great joy to know they aren’t the only churches who have done this. Thankfully, more and more churches are sending out some of their own number to start church planting movements. And they do this knowing ahead of time that the new churches they help to start will look very different from them. Yet they rejoice because these new groups of believers are loving and obeying Jesus. My suspicion and prayer is that something also is ‘crossing over’ in churches in North America.

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Categories: the why
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This is the sixth post of a mini-series on my emotional journey of leaving church-as-we-knew-it to become a missionary-as-a-way-of-life in Los Angeles. To read previous posts, click below:

Something’s Crossed Over In Me – Intro.

Part 1A – Mildly Panicked: Missing my old trees.

Part 1B – Mildly Panicked: Naming my old trees.

Part 2A – Ravenous: Not on bread alone.

Part 2B – Ravenous: Feeding this hunger.

PART 3: WILDLY FREE

Over the past year and a half I’ve struggled with fear and anxiety about leaving behind some of my Christian culture and walking into unfamiliar territory to reach God’s missing ones. (Leaving Christian culture and leaving the faith are not the same thing.) Sometimes I still get anxious, but with less frequency now.

I’ve realized more fully my role as a stranger and alien in this world – not fully at home in the cultures I’m reaching and not fully at home anymore in the Christian culture I came from. Consequently I’ve become overwhelmed with an insatiable hunger for God’s Word and his loving Reign. This hunger, thankfully, is not going away.

And lately I’m noticing that I am starting to live with an altogether new feeling now: More and more I am feeling free, or put more correctly, uninhibited. I am feeling unihibited to simply be church at will, anywhere, anytime.

To illustrate this, Ed likes to share this story about Way of Life Village:

In the past we thought we couldn’t tell certain coworkers and acquaintances about Jesus Christ because they lived too far away from our church building. Seriously. It didn’t matter that we had relational influence – after all we spent more time with some of these coworkers than with friends and family. Since there was little chance that our coworkers would be in a position to commute the long distance to our Sunday services, church social events, and weekly small groups, we didn’t even make the attempt.

But now that we are realizing church is not centered around getting people to enter a geographic location, but into God’s kingdom, we feel free to share Jesus with literally anyone. They don’t have to commute to a church building (or in our case, to a house church gathering). God can work with each person right where they are.

I know what you’re thinking.  This ought to be a no-brainer. Ed add that we all probably said as much before we started this mission. Still, it’s amazing how much we get caught up by the parameters of what we have come to equate with “church”. Plus, some things are best learned through experience!

So now if we find we are crossing paths a lot with someone from Compton or Whittier or Pacoima (places in the LA area that are too far to commute to E-Ho), we can rest easy. We don’t have to persuade that person to drive all the way to Hector and Roxy’s house for a church gathering in Hollywood, for example, just so he can know his Creator and Lord. We can help that person discover who God is, lead him or her to a commitment to Jesus Christ, and help that new disciple to lead his or her own network of relationships to Christ. Each new disciple and his or her household or affinity group is a potential new church …right where they are! There are many examples like this.

Something has crossed over in me, and I can’t go back. Again, I’m not talking about leaving the faith. My faith in Jesus Christ, while it continues to have its obvious ups and downs, is generally speaking stronger than it’s ever been. I do not attribute this to the house church model, as some house church planters are prone to do. As I’ve mentioned before, some of the churches started in LA will stay home-based and laity-led; others will assume other structures. That’s up to them. For me it’s not about how, when or where we do gatherings. It’s about being Jesus’ followers as a way of life in every place we go, with every breath we take. I don’t want anything less for myself, for my family, or for anyone.

It’s also about a difference between having a church-centered mindset and a kingdom mindset. Rather than building a new church with all its programs and trying to get new disciples to be loyal to the thing we’ve built, we share life among God’s missing ones and lovingly help each other receive God’s reign over our lives. In the process new disciples are made and the Holy Spirit causes new churches to spring forth. We serve as a guide in the process, but our focus is changed.  And more and more, I am feeling free.

For Thursday: Conclusion

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We are getting to know a Muslim couple I’ll call Raheem and Malika. They immigrated to the U.S. from a restricted access country in South Asia.  Due to much stereotyping some people would be surprised to know Raheem and Malika are very gentle and kind people, are good with children, desire peace not war, and appreciate the diversity of all peoples.  We really enjoy each other’s company.

Yet there are still walls.  Malika and Katie and Meri were in the kitchen sharing stories and rejoicing in their new friendship. Meri asked, “Tell me honestly, would we be friends if we all were living in your country?”

Malika’s response was telling: “If we had never lived in the U.S. but always lived in my country, and then your family moved there – then, no, we would not be friends.”

“But things are changing,” Malika added. 

Categories: stories, the why
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This is the fifth post on my emotional journey of leaving church-as-I-knew-it to become a missionary-as-a-way-of-life in Los Angeles.  To read the first post click here.  Second post, click here.  Third, here.  Fourth, here. Thanks for reading…

“Something’s crossed over in me…  I can’t go back.”
- Thelma & Louise the movie

PART 2: RAVENOUS

Section B: Trying to feeding this hunger for God.

It’s amazing how ravenous those of us in Way of Life Village became when we found ourselves without the usual mechanisms in place to ‘connect’ with God and his Word. Here are some of our attempts to feed this hunger.

(This is not a check list of ‘things to do’.  It’s a description of what’s been happening to those of us in Way of Life Village.  I’m sure in a year from now we’ll have better ideas.  Despite my rebellious spirit and failures to surrender to his will, I am in awe of God who meets me in my wilderness.  He finds ways to meet my needs when I am feeling hungry and desperate for his intervention, which is about all the time now.  These are our cries for his help.)

Without weekly sermons, Bible classes, and small group Bible studies, we felt compelled to read.  We started gobbling up scripture as if we had just read it for the first time.  This is still going on.  We read it not just for more spiritual information, but for spiritual transformation.  We wanted to be changed, so we made a commitment to obey and share the truths we discover from scripture right away.  We refused to be educated ourselves beyond our obedience!

Without some of the old support systems in place we devoured prayer, carving out time and seeking the Lord with a growing intensity.  In this blog I’ve written about the role prayer is playing in this ministry.  We are becoming a people on our knees.

Without worship services (as we had known them), we devoured each day as an opportunity to worship God as a way of life.  This one is really cool because God has given me a new kind of worship experience that comes as a byproduct of obeying him and sharing his love and message with others.  When I’m weak and disobedient, oh do I miss that experience!  We have focused times of worship with new disciples, but spending alone in awe and reverence of Him has also been worship.  Spending time with His missing ones in the community can be worship when I am reflecting his image.  Surrendering to King Jesus is worship.  More often than not, now the “worship experience” for me comes not from a dynamic and well-orchestrated worship service but from recommitting myself to obedience and from watching peoples’ lives being touched and transformed by the power of Jesus Christ.  It’s hard to top that.  I’m so hungry to see more evidence that God has been active in the world. I want to join Him in this! But being fruitful means a call back to obedience. It is challenging, beautiful, and possible.

We’re ravenous for our kids’ sake, too. Without a Sunday School program our tiny community of faith started taking more responsibility for shaping our children’s spiritual formation, and teaching other families to do the same.  Now instead of leaving a church gathering and asking our children, “What did you learn in Bible class today?” our goal is to arrive at church gatherings ready to share and celebrate what we and our kids learned from God and how we applied it together during the week.  For example, we make use of everyday happenings and turn them into teaching moments.  A woman in our first house church was pained when she saw someone in desperation on the street.  She and her kids who are familiar with the story of the Good Samaritan chose to be “good Samaritans” and help the woman.  This became a teaching moment for her kids, and also a way to worship as a way of life.  When we have taken our boys on nature hikes at Griffith Park, we have asked them to share parts of creation they are thankful for and we sung songs to express our appreciation to our Creator.  I started a new tradition of telling a Bible story to my children each morning and asking them to retell it in their own words, and tell me what they will do to apply and share that story.

This is not unlike the approach we have been taking with adults we’re discipling.  Our hunger is for Jesus Christ.  We are ravenous for God’s loving reign on earth as it is in heaven.  And it is this, not our loyalty to our Christian culture, that we want to pass on to others.

To pass this on, though, we don’t just give up the bad things.  Jesus-followers must also learn to go without some good things, too, when they could serve as distractions to us or the people we’re reaching.  Sometimes (not always) we must let go of time-honored traditions that are dear to us (see previous post).  Especially if we are to connect with our families and communities in ways that are reproducible by them, and lead them to the abundant life in God’s kingdom (John 10:10).  Mysteriously, abundance and sacrifice are both part of the message.

For Tuesday: Part 3 – Wildly Free

Categories: the why
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This is the fourth post on my emotional journey of leaving church-as-I-knew-it to become a missionary-as-a-way-of-life in Los Angeles.  To read the first post click here.  Second post, click here.  Third, here.  Thanks for reading… 

“Something’s crossed over in me…  I can’t go back.” 
- Thelma & Louise the movie

PART 2: RAVENOUS

Section A: Not on bread alone

It has not been easy to sacrifice my favorite church traditions to reach God’s missing ones.  I liken the experience to fasting. When you fast for an extended period of time from food, a “mild panic” can settle in, especially if you’ve never allowed yourself to go without for very long.  You think you’re starving when you’re not.  You find yourself saying, “I really want to eat that!” even at times of day when under normal circumstances you would not reach for food.  In those moments, you can either get obsessed about your lack of nourishment, or you can turn to the Lord and learn from experience what the Bible means by “people do not live on bread alone.”

• The culture of maintaining a constant flow of social events with churchy people (to the exclusion of meaningful time with non-churchy people). 

• The culture of requiring a church building and making it the epicenter of church activity. 

• The culture of viewing limited seating and parking as obstacles to church growth.

• The culture of the clergy-laity system. 

• The cultural language of “going to church” and speaking of “worship” as an event. 

• The culture of pouring a large percentage of our time, energy and resources into the 90-minute Sunday morning experience (and feeling totally wiped out by it). 

• The culture of doing evangelism through attraction (“if we build it they will come”) and extraction (leading individuals to Christ vs leading entire groups/households to Christ).

• The culture of deferring to ministers and official church leaders to study the Bible with people and baptize them. 

• The culture of bowing our heads and closing our eyes to pray (not a bad thing, but not in the Bible). [Thank you to David Watson for showing me the value of asking people first, “If this scripture is true, how would you pray to this God?”]

• The culture of practicing the “Lord’s Supper” as a time of silent introspection (as opposed to an interactive meal like in the New Testament).

• The cultural expectation that sermons will be delivered and heard. 

• The cultural expectation that church gatherings and small group Bible studies are best achieved by establishing a fixed schedule and location.  (same time, same place, every week…) 

• The culture of using a myriad of church programs to assist us in identifying and training more church leaders. 

• The culture of celebrating “bigness” as a goal.  (big crowds, big programs, big budgets, big buildings, etc)

• The list goes on. 

During our ‘fast’ my team and I found that the intensity of our hunger surprised us.  To quote my teammate Ed again, “we became ravenous.”  But not necessarily ravenous for the things on the list above.  Ravenous for God. 

This is not to say that we had never been hungry for or dependent on God prior to this missionary adventure.  But there is something to be said for the experience of leaving the very churched lifestyle to be church among the community.  It does a number on you. 

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This is the third post of a mini-series on my emotional journey of leaving church-as-we-knew-it to become a missionary-as-a-way-of-life in Los Angeles.  To read the first post click here.  Second post, click here.  Thanks for reading… 

“Something’s crossed over in me…  I can’t go back.” 

PART 1: MILDLY PANICKED

Section B: Naming my old trees

Sometimes you don’t know how important a thing has become to you until you don’t have it anymore.  As my friend Ed likes to say, when we stopped going to church to live as missionaries in Los Angeles we began to really feel the absence of the ‘trees’ we had grown accustomed to leaning on for support.  We started naming our trees: church buildings, clergy, valuing and celebrating ‘bigness’ as a goal (“If we can just break the 200-member barrier…”), sermons and lecture-style teaching, the myriad of church social events, the myriad of church programs (children’s ministry, young adults ministry, benevolence ministry, etc), creating dynamic worship events, reaching the lost through attraction strategy (“If we can just get them to show up to our events on our turf, then we can tell them about Jesus…”), to name a few.  The more I think about it, the longer my list of ‘trees’ just keeps growing.   

Let me say right away that these trees are not bad, like some people make them out to be.  In many cases, they are beneficial.  But they are not essential or required to be Christ’s church.  They are traditions, parts of the Christian culture we’ve created.  And like all traditions, if we impose our traditions onto others while sharing the Gospel, people can start to think that they need those things to be church.  And this hinders our participation in God’s mission.  So rather than importing our preferred ways of ‘doing church’ from one culture to another, we decided to share the Gospel as culturally neutral as possible, and let the people develop their own traditions over time.  That means we not only say you can be followers of Jesus without our old ‘trees’ (aka our Christian cultural traditions), we also are attempting to model life without them. This is especially important because we are reaching out to people of other cultures who will in turn reach relatives and friends in their native languages and countries.  It is vital that we teach them from the beginning that God’s Word is all they need. In some cases, we don’t even mention our traditions if they’ve never been exposed to them.      

Life without leaning on our old trees has been a disorienting process for us as missionaries. It even has felt unchristian to go without these traditions, causing us to worry and second guess ourselves at times.  I’m realizing that I had been depending on my Christian cultural traditions to define who I am as a follower of Jesus.  I had leaned on those trees…

§         To give us legitimacy (“We’re a real church because we have these things…”)

§         To measure success and progress in our ministry (“You know it’s going well when large crowds are showing up to stuff and getting involved in the church programs…”)

§         To identify and train leaders (now we were looking for different kind of leaders with different skills sets)

§         To affirm myself as a leader (more on this in a separate post)

§         To get the “worship experience” I desired (I’ve found lots of Christians have started new churches so they could finally do “worship services” the way they wanted.  I realized this may never happen for me.  We are worshiping as a way of life, which for us includes leading people to Christ and coaching them to form churches that worship their way, not ours.  At my previous church I was a worship leader so I had a lot of influence in how things were orchestrated on Sunday mornings. We’ve done some modeling of ‘times of worship to the Lord’ for new disciples, but clearly we are holding back.  Our desire is to let them discover their own ways of expressing devotion and adoration to the Lord.  The implication is that getting the “worship experience” my way is not an option anymore and, well, that really bothered me for awhile!)

§         To find and maintain friendships (we had left a lifestyle of filling up our weeks with church social events and parties with mostly/all Christians)

§         To be spiritually fed (“What will we do without sermons and Bible classes?”)

§         To help spiritually form my children (“Without Sunday School, how will our kids learn the Story of God and find healthy role models in addition to their parents?”)

Like so many of you, I knew beforehand that Christ alone is enough to meet all these needs.  I already knew that my Christian cultural traditions may have been beneficial to my faith yet they were not required to be a Christian and in some cases their prolonged use even came with side effects.  At least I had intellectually acknowledged this.  But there is something about literally stripping away all the extraneous things from the seed (God’s Word) as we join God in planting it into people’s hearts.  We started to experience in a new way what it means to live on Christ alone.  It’s simple, but not easy.  When I first tried to imagine life without these trees it sounded adventurous and fun (which of course it is).  But when I actually left my previous church and lived a few months without my trees, it gave me an upset stomach and sleepless nights.  I had been ‘going to church’ for 35 years.  I have much to unlearn.  I’ve gone so long with these traditions, can I really live without them? 

Next post from this series will be on Saturday.

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