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.

Categories: Uncategorized