Rethink Mission: Inspiring gospel-centered missional churches

There are no shortages of conferences for Christian pastors. Instead of Death by Meeting, for me one day it will be death by a conference. I can see it now. It will happen at The Converge Confluence Church Multiplication (Next Gen) Missional Global Awareness Summit™ – Ed Stetzer will be speaking of course – and I will just keel over and die from conference overexposure.

Something about Verge was different – and I want to get it down before I forget. Because I easily forget.

1. Worship Gatherings Should Not Be Abandoned
This first thing is actually a running thought I had throughout the conference.

One of my fears is that young zealots will walk away from Verge and say, “I get it now. We’re going to totally scrap our public worship gathering,” or “Who needs preaching? It takes the already limited time I have away from community and mission.”

Maybe some failed to notice, but during Verge we were convicted, inspired, moved, and challenged… all through preaching and powerful corporate worship experiences.

I know that as a whole, we’re moving away from event and program-driven Christianity (good!) – but an “event” is an okay event in my book if at that event the gospel is proclaimed, God’s Spirit is present, and the sacraments are observed.

2. Francis Chan is Awesome But Not For the Reasons You Think
Yeah, Francis Chan blew us away.

Here’s what stuck out to me, though, more than any one thing he said: we saw this mega-church pastor get on his knees in front of us all and beg God, in tears, to show him how to do church.

You got this sense from him the entire weekend that the bigness of his church didn’t matter. His books didn’t matter. His reputation as a pastor didn’t matter.  He acknowledged that he distrusted even his own motives for why he does what he does and that he wanted to be courageous enough to ask the question: does any of the stuff we think is so important in the evangelical world really matter in the end?

3. The Holy Spirit is Real
The best part of the weekend was a worship session on Saturday afternoon that never seemed to stop. It was time for the singing to be done and for all of us to move on to the next deal on the schedule – except that God had something else on His schedule.

Matt Carter got up and acknowledged that something was going on. Breakouts were going to start soon and that if people needed to go they could, but he opened the door for others to stick around if they felt so led. And we did. People just stood there. Or knelt. Or bowed.

And then one by one, people spontaneously started calling out to God. In a group of thousands, people started calling on the name of Jesus.

It’s hard to describe what happened, and I really don’t want to dishonor that moment by trying to make it seem more dramatic than it was. I’ll just say that for me it was an intense moment of sensing God’s hugeness and my own smallness and yet feeling accepted in that instead of alienated. It’s the first time I’ve seen something like that happen in a group that large since my charismatic revival days.

4. Mission & Community Are Hard
I was trying to explain to a friend unfamiliar with evangelical church jargon what a “Missional Community Conference” was about. I failed. It should’ve been simple because the conference was about mission and community (obviously).

Here’s why this conference sticks out: Verge was not just about mission and community, it was about being committed to those things until it gets painful.

Being committed to doing mission with a small band of people who know you well should and will be uncomfortable. It will cost me something. It will hurt.

But it’s worth it.

That’s what I’m leaving with. It showed up in the teaching, sure, but I got a fresh reminder in person.

During the weekend, I got to spend some time with Josh Wilson, a close friend and co-worker from The Journey that I hadn’t seen in months.  Right now, since leaving one church and getting ready to plant another, my experience of community is somewhat sporadic at best.

Seeing Josh reminded me first of the depth of friendship I miss out on when I am away from community. Secondly, it reminded me that community is painful because it means letting people get close enough to call you on your garbage. I don’t like getting called on my garbage.

There’s a trend right now among evangelical pastors that plays on our natural fears and desire to manipulate. It says that if you’re a pastor, you can only let people get so close. If people get too close, then you loose some of your power. Clear lines of authority get cloudy. You loose organizational effectiveness in pursuit of relationship. It’s that much harder to hold someone accountable to job performance and becomes close to impossible to fire them, if God forbid, one day you’re forced to.

Who cares.

Letting people in close enough to see through your every motivation is stinking painful. But the alternative – living life alone, surrounded only by admirers and no real friends – is infinitely worse.

Tags: community, leadership

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 8:56 pm and is filed under Verge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.