Video 18 Re-Activating the Once Active
David Kinnaman shares a sad story about a church dropout named Tracy. Though raised in the church, she became disillusioned with Christianity and ended up fading away from the faith. However, she always had a passion to help the poor. She spent some time in Tanzania to work with vulnerable people. After hearing her story and her heart for the vulnerable, Kinnaman said to her in passing, “It seems like God has put it in your heart. You were made for it.” After all, Tracy’s heart for the poor echoes God’s heart (Matthew 25:31-46). Her response was disheartening: “Oh, huh. I never thought of my interest in helping the poor around the world as a calling from God. It just feels like in America everyone keeps faith separate from work and life.”
How is it that someone can grow up in church and cultivate a passion for the poor and vulnerable yet never be shown—discipled—how this is deeply connected to the heart of Christ? And this isn’t just an isolated incident. Only 20 percent of Millennials who grew up in church say that they had opportunities to serve the poor through their church. Even fewer (15 percent) said they found a cause or issue at church that motivated them.
Several churches I know are recognizing this incessant, God-given, Jesus-reflecting desire to serve the poor and the community, and they have integrated some sort of “Serve Sunday” into their church calendar. One awesome church in Boise cancels the church service every six weeks in order to go out into the community and physically serve others around them. They partner with several nonprofit organizations in town and ask them, “How can we serve you?” Sometimes it’s picking weeds at a women’s halfway house, or maybe it’s helping out at a garden that provides food for refugees. Whatever it is, their heart is to bring the tangible love of Christ to bear on the community through real acts of physical service.
Rather than just doing church work, they’re doing the work of the church. You know what’s interesting? The pastor told me that these “Serve Sundays” are usually the most well-attended Sundays of the month! At first I was shocked. I thought that if you “canceled church” (which isn’t a theologically correct description of what’s going on), hardly anyone would show up. But the opposite is true. Deep down in the heart of most people is a desire to engage in meaningful activity.
What’s even more fascinating is that most members of this church find it much easier to bring their friends to this type of “service.” After all, it’s not just Christians who seek the good of their community. When unbelievers find out that Christians actually care about the real needs around them, they usually perk up and want to listen to what we have to say.
Most Christians (and many non-Christians) desire to do good in their community. They want to serve the poor, confront injustice, combat racism, help refugees, and share the love of Christ through word and deed—especially deed. Part of our discipleship process should empower people to engage the mission of Christ wherever they are.
We shouldn’t see discipleship activities like church services and Bible studies as preparation for the mission. Jesus didn’t take this approach and neither should we. Rather, we should view missional activities as part of the discipleship journey. We learn, we serve, and we learn by serving.
Mission is not something that occurs after disciples become mature. It’s part of the maturation process of discipleship. Churches that desire to help disciples “be transformed into Christlikeness” need to integrate missional activities—or let’s just call it a “missional lifestyle”—into its process.
I love what my friends at Imago Dei Church in Portland do to integrate mission into discipleship. They intentionally devote a significant part of their money to help fund missional projects that are created and developed by members of the church. They call them “missional grants.” Not every project gets funded. There’s a whole application and interview process that identifies the most promising ideas. But every year, the church gives anywhere from $100,000 to $200,000 toward missional projects that are designed to further God’s kingdom in Portland.
I love this idea for several reasons. First, it allocates some church funds toward local missions. Too many church budgets are sucked up by Sunday services, and not enough is given toward discipleship and missions. And quite frankly, many Christians are getting tired of it. They want to see more funds allocated toward meaningful and missional ventures. When Imago Dei funds such missional projects, it shows that they care about extending Christ’s love beyond the four walls of church. This resonates with its people—and with Jesus as well.
Second, by funding these projects, Imago Dei empowers the people according to the asset-based community development (ABCD) principles we discussed earlier. As image bearers, all people possess gifts and talents that should be used to further God’s kingdom. Yet people often feel stifled or forced to fit into a few prepackaged programs that are created from the top down. By funding projects created by the people, Imago Dei empowers and encourages people to explore their own passions for God’s kingdom.
My friend Joshua Ryan Butler, the outreach pastor at Imago Dei, says it like this: We have an unwritten rule at our church: “pastors can’t start ministries.” When people hear this, they’re often shocked, like “But isn’t that your job? The Outreach Pastor to start ministries and get people into them?” But we start from the opposite end: we believe God has gifted his people, the body of Christ, with vision, talent, and imagination—they have better ideas than I do! And that’s a good thing. So, I see my role as the pastor not being to create the thing and rope them into it, but rather being available to help surface, equip, and unleash them in areas God might be calling them into—and then to shepherd them as they lead our church into embodying the love of Christ in those areas of our city.
I mentioned my friend Shawn Gordon, who was discipled by Francis Chan. Shawn now helps run Project Bayview, a discipleship ministry where several men, mostly ex-cons like Shawn, live together above a restaurant. Not only does the restaurant serve up some killer Hawaiian BBQ, but it also becomes a holistic discipleship center, where men cook, clean, work the counter, serve tables, and learn how to integrate the gospel into a workday. Above the restaurant, each disciple is paired up with a discipler. They live together, study together, pray together, and work together. When they’re not studying the Bible or working in the restaurant, they’re on the streets sharing the Good News of Jesus in a neighborhood where his love is greatly needed.
What if churches around the country created their own Project Bayviews, not as some nonprofit that they support from a distance but as an integral part of church life? My guess is that there would be a long waiting list of people wanting to help out with this ministry. Perhaps they’d have to start another Project Bayview . . . and another.
We need to stop thinking about mission as some subsidiary part of our church experience, which usually focuses on Sunday services. When mission becomes more central, discipleship becomes more tangible and effective.
I recently read Brandon Hatmaker’s book Barefoot Church just before Brandon and I hung out on a hunting trip in Montana. I can’t remember whether I read about his story in his book, or if I got it from our campfire conversations. Anyway, it’s a challenging testimony that made me think, I want to do that!
Brandon was on staff at a megachurch in Texas—living the pastoral dream. But God started to wreck his life by telling him to serve the poor. So Brandon dragged his grill downtown to where the homeless would hang out, and he started barbecuing burgers as an avenue for relationship. Over the next few weeks, more and more people came to hang out and talk about life, love, community, and Jesus. Brandon told me that he hit a turning point in his “grilling sessions” when an unchurched, agnostic woman was on the grill cooking for the masses. Someone blurted out, “What if church was kind of like this?” Without lifting up her head, the woman said, “If church was like this, I would go to that church.” She kept on grilling. Brandon realized he wasn’t just grilling burgers and hanging out with the homeless. He was planting a church.
Brandon followed Jesus all the way to the poor, and a church sprang up. If that’s not discipleship, I don’t know what is. Mission and discipleship belong together. You can’t have one without the other.
Just to be clear, despite everything I’ve said, I don’t believe we should replace morality with mission. To become like Jesus, we need to pursue sexual purity, sobriety, generosity, selflessness, and kindness, and we need to put to death personal vices such as anger, greed, jealousy, lust, and pride. My point is not to replace morality with mission but to view mission as part of morality.
I want to close this session by giving a more thorough description of what it means to live missionally. I just so happened to stumble upon a description of the term missional in Dan Kimball’s book They Like Jesus but Not the Church. It’s honestly the best summary I think I’ve ever seen. So instead of reinventing the wheel, I’ll just hijack Dan’s description—giving him full credit, of course:
- Being missional means that the church sees itself as being missionaries, rather than having a missions department, and that we see ourselves as missionaries right where we live.
- Being missional means that we see ourselves as representatives of Jesus “sent” into our communities, and that the church aligns everything it does with the missio Dei (mission of God).
- Being missional means we see the church not as a place we go only on Sunday but as something we are throughout the week.
- Being missional means that we understand we don’t “bring Jesus” to people but that we realize Jesus is active in culture and we join him in what he is doing.
- Being missional means we are very much in the world and engaged in culture but are not conforming to the world.
- Being missional means we serve our communities and that we build relationships with the people in them, rather than seeing them as evangelistic targets.
-
Being missional means being all the more dependent on Jesus and the Spirit through prayer, the Scriptures, and each other in community.