LeakeSpeak

Or at least that’s what it feels like I’m having right now. We on CPT have been taking more care the past year and a half with the answer to the million dollar question asked by locals: “Why are you here?”

We have stayed away from saying, “We’re missionaries.” This because what we mean by the term ‘missionary’ and what locals understand by it are two entirely different things; their understanding carrying quite negative connotations. So officially, we belong to a non-profit community service/development organization that is here to meet the physical and spiritual needs of our region.

People always want to know where we get our money from. Saying something like, “Well, people back home send us money to live off of and then our job is to go around and talk to people all day,” has never seemed an entirely satisfactory answer for them. It makes us come off as somewhat rich and lazy in the eyes of the locals. We do try and work jobs in keeping with the mission of our community service organization (and hopefully in keeping with the kingdom of God). That’s what has three of us trying to start a water filter business right now and Pam teaching English classes. The problem there is that the 10-20 hours of “real work” we do each week is still a far cry from the taxing 60-hour-a-week schedule many of our friends here have.

These complexities have me and the rest of CPT asking some tough questions right now about exactly what our role is here and what our identity in the community should be. Add to the mix a number of tough challenges and considerations (a number of which I’ve shared on this blog) coming out of our reading of Donovan’s Christianity Rediscovered, and we’re not exactly sure which way to turn.

1. We could completely discard any attempt to have a legitimate, respectable identity with the people and spend all our time preaching, teaching, and praying. That’s something close to what Donovan did among the Masai of Tanzania, and some might argue it’s close to what the Apostle Paul did.
2. We could continue on as we are doing, making a bit of money and establishing something of an identity through community development/tentmaking jobs, and then preach, pray, and make disciples on the job and with our time outside of work.
3. The economic problems have been hurting some of us financially. We could truly focus on trying to earn a significant portion of our finances through some type of job (which would probably have to be online). This would satisfactorily answer the questions people here have about how we support ourselves, but it would also cut into discipleship time.
4. Maybe another option exists that we haven’t considered?

Contemporary wisdom on multiplication and church planting movements says we should never minister in a way that cannot be easily reproduced by our disciples. If that’s the case, we wonder if living fully off of missionary support and spending all our time in prayer and meetings can ever be easily replicated down here, or if locals trying to adopt that model would hinder a movement. Dabbling in “work” a few hours a week and then doing a lot of discipleship outside of that also doesn’t seem very reproducible, though it is expedient. Working a full-time schedule and getting in what disciple-making work we can on the side is what most or all of our followers here will probably need to do. So in that respect, the model can be replicated. But one can ask whether our role as outside missionaries should be different, even if it’s not reproducible.

I really don’t know, but I think I need some answers.

I have said that this year I want to learn more about leadership and authority structure in the church. Alan Knox intrigued me this past week with his republished post “The Holy Spirit has made you overseers“. Here’s an excerpt:

According to Acts 20:28 (above), it is the Holy Spirit who makes someone a pastor. Does the Holy Spirit do this as a response to the actions of a church? I don’t think so. Instead, I believe that the Holy Spirit makes someone an overseer regardless of the actions or lack of actions of the church itself.

In other words, the Holy Spirit places someone in a group of believers and subsequently gives that person the responsibility of “caring for” (that is, being an overseer for) that group of believers. The church is then supposed to respond to the work of the Holy Spirit and to recognize that individual as an overseer.

This is an interesting thought, one that has some scriptural support, and one that goes against a lot of our actual practice in the church. Alan’s post caught my attention because I was thinking about similar things this past week.

Last Tuesday, at our weekly church planting team meeting, a couple members of our team were relating challenges they’ve been facing with a budding home fellowship. This fellowship has two couples who meet together semi-regularly for Bible study, prayer, etc. One man is viewed by the four adults involved as the leader of the group, though he has not officially been given that position. Some holes in his leadership, possibly rooted in some sin issues, were concerning our team because of the negative effect they could have on the fellowship. They asked my advice.

Though this man is not an “official” leader in the fellowship, I focused on the fact that the rest of the group views him as a leader. They are placing themselves under his authority. God has driven home to me recently that (without arguing technicalities) the only time to disobey someone in authority over us is if that person tells us to sin. The leader in question was not telling others to sin.

Some might say this man shouldn’t be in leadership or doesn’t actually have any authority. Maybe the other members of the fellowship should resist him if he’s not leading in a good way. Whether or not humans have formally placed this man in authority, though, I could not see advising other members of the flock to step out from under his covering if they have submitted themselves already to his spiritual authority. It seems that they have given him authority. And maybe their submission to him is actually an extension of the Holy Spirit giving him authority.

If this man is not in leadership, the only other choices are the other man in the group (who is great but doesn’t seem cut out for leadership), the two wives in the group (we won’t raise those questions here), or members of our expatriate church planting team (we are trying to empower local leaders and work ourselves out of a job). I advised our team to instruct the rest of the group to continue to submit to this leader’s authority and then pray that God would bring about any needed changes in his life.

Our conversation took place Tuesday morning. By Saturday morning, our two church planters who raised the issue already had a great testimony of a noticeable change taking place in the life of their disciple.

This post is more just a “thinking out loud” regarding a situation, rather than a tidy box of something I feel like I’ve figured out. I welcome any perspectives or additional thoughts you, my readers, would like to contribute in the comments.

What do you think of my advice to our church planting team? Can the Holy Spirit place someone in a position of authority in a church without it ever being formally recognized by the people?

I read Roland Allen’s work Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? four years ago, while a student in GFM’s Mission Training School. I blew through the book so quickly then, that I didn’t learn much that has translated to practical application in my ministry. BUT, I know enough and hear enough good recommendations of it from people I trust, to know it’s well worth reading. That’s why I’m starting to dig into it again.

Alan Hirsch (of The Forgotten Ways fame) lets us know that Allen’s two most-read books are available online for free. If you’re not familiar with Allen’s work, these might be worth checking out. Here are the links:

Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours?

The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church: and the Causes which Hinder it

For those who have been challenged by Alan Hirsch, he says of these two Roland Allen books, “All interested in missional movements MUST read them.” Not a bad endorsement!

This I was interested to learn, since we are finding that simple house church fellowships seem to be an effective model for our work in Mexico. I’m not trumpeting house churches as the only good church model, because it’s clear that God is working through all kinds of models. House churches do have some upside, though.

Check this out:

The following characteristics summarize Luther’s “Order of Divine Service” as to the “how” churches should be organized.

Self-organized

Home-based

Lay led

Full sacramental life

Stewardship and social ministry

Simple catechetical instruction

Ideal context for loving accountability after Matthew 18

“Form and Order” are not imported but emerge spontaneously from community life.

From Tim Thompson via Guy Muse.

Apparently, Luther would have liked to see things happen this way, but felt at his time that he lacked the necessary leaders and that people weren’t into it. If Luther were alive today, I wonder if he would be trying to lead a reformation in the direction of home fellowships and lay leadership? What do you think?

Thanks to Alan Knox over at The Assembling of the Church for linking my post ‘What discipleship is not‘. In the comments, Alan adds these three thoughts to the discussion:

• It is not education (information).
• It is not one-sided.
• It is not accidental.

In his post, Alan shifts the discussion to what discipleship is, and he asks the following questions:

What is discipleship? What role does God play in discipleship? What role does the disciple-maker play in discipleship? What role does the one being discipled play in discipleship? Can there be a blurring between the disciple-maker and the discipler? Is that type of blurring good or bad?

What is the goal of discipleship? Do certain activities lead to that goal? Are certain settings more conducive to reaching that goal? Is discipleship only one-on-one or can someone disciple a small group or a large group? What role does teaching play in discipleship? How is education related to discipleship? What about other spiritual gifts?

These are good questions; important ones for us to be asking if we are to effectively disciple others. In the comments on Alan’s post, I shared the following thoughts in response to his questions and the comments of other readers:

I’ve become a big fan of life-on-life discipleship (though other modes exist), and I think that one important type of discipleship relationship is that of a believer helping a less mature believer grow in obedience to Christ. I also like the thought about blurring the lines between discipler and disciplee, though.

Something I have been thinking about lately I’ve been calling the “round table of discipleship” for lack of a better term. I serve with a team of missionaries, several of whom are older than me. One man, the oldest, has probably the most life experience and overall spiritual maturity. He can teach the rest of us a lot. The leader of our team, much younger than this man, can learn from him but can also teach him some things about effective cross-cultural mission work. Everyone around me, younger or older, can teach me things in various areas, and in certain areas I can help even those who have more experience than me with a thing or two. So there is a lot of give and take, not a clear-cut hierarchy.

Do you have any thoughts about what discipleship is and/or what discipleship is not that you would add to this discussion?

We need some clear idea of what discipleship is (even if we have different ideas) in order to effectively make disciples, thus fulfilling the Great Commission.

As I have been learning more the past year and a half about what good discipleship is, I’m also learning what it is not:

It is not a class

The end goal of discipleship must always be obedience. In Matthew 28:20, Jesus says that discipleship is “teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (emphasis mine). James 1:22-25 underscores the importance of doing the word, not just listening to it. “Discipleship” that focuses only on gaining knowledge and correct doctrine with little practical application is not true Jesus-style discipleship at all.

It is not control

Jesus did not make all his disciples’ decisions for them. Disciples must be free to act according to their own volition and, sometimes, to mess up. Failure can be a great teacher. Disciplers who don’t give their disciples room to err may be stunting the growth of those under their care. Overcontrol can cause a disciple to have an unhealthy level of dependency on his/her discipler.

It is not a 12-week program

Discipleship is ongoing. Because the goal of discipleship is obedience to Christ, and because obedience to Christ takes a lifetime to live out, no believer ever graduates from needing discipleship.

It is not an activity to be performed by an elite few

Jesus commanded His disciples to make disciples, so if you’re a disciple you must be making new ones.

Is there anything you would add to this list? Who are you discipling, and who is discipling you?

(Click to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 of this 5-part series.)

The last of the Points to Ponder we have been sharing with our mission trip teams this summer:

Have you ever wondered how we could win the world to Christ in our lifetime?

The Great Commission, that command Jesus gave all his disciples to do while He was gone, boils down to this: make disciples. Tragically, we get distracted with programs and organizations and structures and almost anything other than making disciples like Jesus said to do. Making disciples, according to what Jesus said, very simply amounts to teaching them to obey everything He commanded.

Teaching everything Jesus commanded includes teaching disciples to make other disciples. That was one of His commands; therefore, a disciple, by definition, is one who makes other Christ-followers. Jesus spent His public ministry, first and foremost, raising up a group of followers and telling them to do the same. This is because He knows the power of multiplication.

Guess what would happen if just one follower of Christ, in the next year, raised up one new follower and taught him also to make one new disciple each year? On down the line, every new disciple makes one new disciple a year and each new one is taught to do the same. Get the picture? At the end of the first year, you have two followers of Jesus, at the end of the second year you have four since they each made one new disciple, and so on down the line. If things continued this way with no break in the chain of multiplication, the entire population of the world would be following Jesus in 34 years. (And that’s accounting for a lot of population growth.) Amazing!

And, by the way, this year if all people who call themselves followers of Jesus each made one new disciple and taught them to do the same, in four years the entire world would be won to Christ. Four years! That’s the power of multiplication.

When we look at the needs around us and the fact that over 2.5 billion people have no self-sufficient church among them capable of making disciples of the rest of their people group, it’s easy to become overwhelmed. We either get discouraged and do nothing, or we try and do everything, figuring, “It’s up to me to win the whole world”. Neither response is healthy or productive. The second response is the one that runs many professional clergymen into the ground as they try and build gigantic organizations and programs that will somehow turn the tide of lostness. The best action would be for us all to start obeying Jesus and disciple a few people around us as followers of Christ. This should be our first and most important work. If believers everywhere would only take this to heart, we would take territory from the kingdom of darkness on a scale rarely, if ever, witnessed before in human history.

So how about you? Will you take to heart the command to make disciples of all nations and teach them to obey everything Jesus commanded? Or did Jesus just give that command to special people not like you?

This is Part 2 in a series of Points 2 Ponder that we are presenting to our mission trip participants this month.

Read the first post in the series here.

Our church planting coach, Rob, explains that as cross-cultural missionaries, we are the scaffolding, not the building. The function of scaffolding is support. Scaffolding is temporary, and once the building is done, the scaffolding is moved elsewhere to work on another building. The scaffolding goes; the building stays behind. For a building to stand, therefore, the scaffolding cannot be a part of it. If bricks or support columns or parts of the foundation are built on top of the scaffolding, then when the scaffolding is removed, the building will crumble.

This analogy holds important truths for the cross-cultural minister. New churches must be self-sufficient. They must be built upon the foundation of Christ, not the foreign missionaries. Cross-cultural church planters should plan on serving among a people group for a finite amount of time and should have a clear exit strategy. It can make us feel good to be in control and have positions of leadership and authority, but doing this puts the churches we plant at risk of crumbling when we leave.

This belief is having a lot of practical implications these days for GFM and the way we minister. For example, in the short-term, it might be helpful for us to provide salaries for local pastors. What happens when we leave, though? Or can we ever leave if we have an arrangement like that? At some point, church leaders we raise up will have to be financially self-sufficient, rather than dependent on foreign funds. It seems a whole lot easier to help them be self-sufficient from Day One, perhaps by working with them to develop new businesses, than to get them dependent on us and then try and cut those ties later on.

Also, when a new church begins to meet, we have the new believers run all aspects of the meeting almost immediately. We disciple them outside of the meetings, but in the meetings we generally won’t do or lead something after about the third time the group gets together. This includes teaching. As long as we are properly discipling the converts, they should have something to teach right away. And after all, to teach something, you don’t have to know everything, right? You just have to know one thing.

By understanding our role as scaffolding, we are able to encourage, support, and disciple, without being the primary pastors or leaders. This allows new churches to quickly mature and become self-sufficient, rather than being weak and dependent on outsiders for years or even decades.

What I describe here is just one small step among many along the way, but it still represents a milestone in our church planting work.  The first real meeting of our team’s new disciples, led by the disciples themselves, took place this past week.  Two couples came together with two members of our team and had a good time of sharing from the Bible.  One man led the study and did a great job of inviting discussion from the entire group.  Both couples enjoyed the time and agreed to meet again in a few days, this time with the other husband doing the teaching.

A couple of key things need to take place for our work to be done here:

1. Disciples must eventually take responsibility for their own spiritual lives and communities of faith, without outside help.
2. Disciples must reproduce themselves by making more new disciples.

This week’s meeting was an important event along the road towards self-leadership and self-sufficiency.  It is an encouraging sign.  We will be looking to see this church body continue to mature, and we are praying for these new believers to begin reproducing themselves.  Will you join us in praying for the work here in southern Mexico?

That’s right, I’m getting out of the business of starting churches.  The reasons are simple, but they have taken me until the past few months to grasp:

• Jesus never told us to plant churches.  He said that He would build His church.  (Matt. 16:18)
• Jesus did tell us to make disciples.  (Matt. 28:18-20)

Part of making proper disciples is teaching them to come together in community, living out what it means to be the Body of Christ.  This involves obeying all the “one another” commands of the New Testament.  So if we do a good job of evangelism and discipleship, the natural result of that will be new churches springing up - new communities of faith.  But that part is the work of Jesus.  He said so.

This has been a very freeing realization for me as a church planter (wait, an ex-church planter).  In the past several months, I worried a lot about what the structure of the churches we planted would look like.  We would love to see an awesome network of house churches spring up in our region of southern Mexico, so we had been trying to figure out how they would be linked together, what authority would look like, etc.  Our church planting coach, Rob, set me straight by basically saying, “Hey, don’t worry about it.  You just organically network new believers and groups by giving them opportunities to befriend one another, and rest assured that they will define the structure at some point.”  And you know, I can see that Rob is right.  We missionaries and church planters can get off track worrying about things that aren’t ours to worry about.  Jesus told us to make disciples, that’s the command we have to obey, and the rest we can leave up to Him.

I’ll still call it church planting, I suppose, just because that’s a widely understood term, but whenever I speak of it you can know that what I really mean is that we’re making disciples and God is working through us to start churches.

Any other church planters want to join me in walking off the job?