Here is another excellent excerpt from chapter 10 of Donald Miller’s “Searching For God Knows What.” The title of chapter 10 is “The Gospel of Jesus: It Never Was a Formula.”

Becoming a Christian might look more like falling in love than baking cookies. Now don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that in order for a person to know Jesus they must get a kind of crush on Him. But what I am suggesting is that, not unlike any other relationship, a person might need to understand that Jesus is alive, that He exists, that He is God, that He is in authority, that we need to submit to Him, that He has the power to save, and so on and son on, all of which are ideas, but ideas entangled in a kind of relational dynamic. This seems more logical to me because if God made us, wants to know us, then this would require a more mysterious interaction than what would be required by following a kind of recipe.

I realize it all sounds terribly sentimental, but imagine the other ideas popular today that we sometimes hold up as credible: We believe a person will gain access to heaven because he is knowledgeable about theology, because he can win at a game of religious trivia. And we may believe a person will find heaven because she is very spiritual and lights incense and candles and takes bubble baths and reads books that speak of centering her inner self; and some of us believe a person is a Christian because he believes five ideas that Jesus communicated here and there in Scripture, though never completely at one time and in one place; and some people believe they are Christians because they do good things and associate themselves with some kind of Christian morality; and some people believe they are Christians because they are Americans.

If any of these models are true, people who read the Bible before we systematically broke it down, and, for that matter, people who believed in Jesus before the printing press or before the birth of Western civilization, are at an extreme disadvantage. It makes you wonder if we have fashioned a gospel around our culture and technology and social economy rather than around the person of Christ.

- Donald Miller in Searching For God Knows What

Almighty God, who has given your only Son to be unto us both a sacrifice for sin and also an example of his godly life: Give me grace that I may always most thankfully receive that his inestimable benefit and also daily endeavor myself to follow the blessed steps of his most holy life; through the same your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

- The Prayer Appointed for the Week, The Divine Hours

God of justice, God of mercy, bless all those who are surprised with pain this day from suffering caused by their own weakness or that of others. Let what we suffer teach us to be merciful; let our sins teach us to forgive. This we ask through the intercession of Jesus and all who died forgiving those who oppressed them. Amen.

- The Concluding Prayer of the Church, The Divine Hours

Perhaps the reason Scripture includes so much poetry in and outside the narrative, so many parables and stories, so many visions and emotional letters, is because it is attempting to describe a relational break man tragically experienced with God and a disturbed relational history man has had since then and, furthermore, a relational dynamic man must embrace in order to have relational intimacy with God once again, thus healing himslef of all the crap he gets into while looking for a relationship that makes him feel whole.

Maybe the gospel of Jesus, in other words, is all about our relationship with Jesus rather than about ideas. And perhaps our lists and formulas and bullet points are nice in the sense that they help us memorize different truths, but harmful in the sense that they blind us to the necessary relationship that must begin between ourselves and God for us to become His followers. And worse, perhaps our formulas and bullet points and steps steal the sincerity with which we might engage God.

- Donald Miller in Searching For God Knows What

Old habits are hard to break, and no one is easily weaned from his own opinions; but if you rely on your own reasoning and ability rather than on the virtue of submission to Jesus Christ, you will but seldom and slowly attain wisdom. For God wills that we become perfectly obedient to himself, and that we transcend mere reason on the wings of burning love for him.

- Thomas a Kempis

It makes me wonder if, because of this reduced version of the claims of Christ, we believe the gospel is easy to understand, a simple mental exercise, not in the least bit mysterious. And if you think about it, a person has a more difficult time explaining romantic love, for instance, or beauty, or the Trinity, than the gospel of Jesus. John would open his gospel by presenting the idea that God is the Word and Jesus is the Word and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Not exactly bullet points for easy consumption. Perhaps our reduction of these ideas has caused us to miss something.

- Donald Miller in Searching For God Knows What

I love the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip written by Bill Watterson. I have C&H on my sidebar gadgets, my laptop screen saver, and we have C&H books scattered in what seems ever room of the house. Like many others, I was disappointed when Watterson made the decision in 1995 to retire from cartooning. Well, I was delighted to discover a wonderful essay by Fred Sanders titled “What You Can Learn from Calvin and Hobbes about the Message and the Medium” over at The Scriptorium Daily. Sanders discusses lessons learned from Watterson and how those lessons should be applied to the way the church communicates the Gospel of Jesus. (HT: Tim Challies)

Over the next few days I want to share a series of excerpts from Donald Miller’s “Searching For God Knows What.” I want to focus specifically on chapter ten titled “The Gospel of Jesus: It Never Was a Formula.” Miller makes a wonderful and whimsical case for the relational dynamic of the Gospel. Here is the open story of chapter ten:

My friend Greg and I have been talking quite a bit about what it means to follow Jesus. Greg would not consider himself as somebody who takes Jesus seriously, but he admits to having questions. I didn’t have a formula for him to understand how a Christian conversion works, but I told him that many years ago, when I was a child, I had heard about Jesus and found the idea of Him compelling, then much later while reading the Gospels, came to believe I wanted to follow Him. This changed things in my life, I said, because it involved giving up everything and choosing to go into a relationship with Him.

Greg told me he had seen a pamphlet with four or five ideas on it, ideas such as man was a sinner, sin separated man from God, and Christ died to absolve the separation. He asked me if this was what I believed, and I told him, essentially, that it was. “Those would be the facts of the story,” I said, “but that isn’t the story.”

“Those are the ideas, but it isn’t the narrative,” Greg stated rhetorically.

“Yes,” I told him.

Earlier that same year I had a conversation with my friend Omar, who is a student at a local college. For his humanities class, Omar was assigned to read the majority of the Bible. He asked to meet with me for coffee, and when we sat down he put a Bible on the table as well as a pamphlet containing the same five or six ideas Greg had mentioned. He opened the pamphlet, read the ideas, and asked if these concepts were important to the central message of Christianity. I told Omar they were critical; that, basically, this was the gospel of Jesus, the backbone of Christian faith. Omar then opened his Bible and asked, “If these ideas are so important, why aren’t they in this book?” Read the rest of this entry

As a young follower of Jesus, I was taught that Jesus had commanded his disciples to go into the world and make disciples. It is ture. He did. However, I began to notice that while many missionary-driven, transform-the-world types were passionate about making a difference in the world and effecting change in other people’s lives, they often failed to invest the same energy in transforming their own life. When they did make personal adjustments, it was often motivated by their desire to be more effective in their world changing.

It began to occur to me that if the God of the universe has truly taken up residence in us, radical changes in us should be inescapable. No gardener takes over a new plot and doesn’t remove the weeds, prune the trees, and introduce and nurture new, more appropriate, and beautiful plants. It also occured to me that as a world changer, Jesus was not very strategic. He arrived in a small, somewhat inconsequential country, spent three years with twelve uninfluential men and a broader gathering of unknown men and women, and oh, by the way, changed the world. I decided that either Jesus was doing something wrong or contemporary world changers were.

- Dick Staub in The Culturally Savvy Christian

“When we enter into solitude to be with God alone, we quickly discover how dependent we are. Without the many distractions of our daily lives, we feel anxious and tense. When nobody speaks to us, calls on us, or needs our help, we start feeling like nobodies. Then we begin wondering whether we are useful, valuable, and significant. Our tendency is to leave this fearful solitude quickly and get busy again to reassure ourselves that we are ’somebodies.’ But that is a temptation, because what makes us somebodies is not other people’s responses to us but God’s eternal love for us.”

- Henri Nouwen (HT: dream awakener)

“In addition to holding a clear vision, missional leadership involves facilitating the emergence of novelty by building and nurturing networks of communications; creating a learning culture in which questioning is encouraged and innovation is rewarded; creating a climate of trust and mutual support; and recognizing viable novelty when it emerges, while allowing the freedom to make mistakes.

It is for this reason that Roxburgh and Romanuk can say that the role of leadership within the church is to cultivate environments wherein the Spirit of God might call forth and unleash the missional imagination of the people of God.”

- Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways

Lately I have been involved in several conversations concerning the lack of interest or desire for change in the local church. Others have noted that their church has become too comfortable. Further, in the midst of this complacency they have noticed that the church has begun to decline in effectiveness towards connecting with those outside the church as well as disciplining those within the body.

Last night I was revisiting some thoughts from “The Forgotten Ways.” In chapter eight Hirsch quotes from “Surfing the Edge of Chaos” by Richard Pascale and “Unfreezing Moves” by William Easum in the midst of a discussion on learning from systems theory for the health of living organizations. Living systems theory says that:

Equilibrium is a precursor to death. “When a living system is in a state of equilibrium, it is less responsive to changes occurring around it. This places it at maximum risk.” (Pascale) This correlates to the situation in the organizational lifecycle when organizations tend to over regulate, lose dynamism, inhabit unresponsive structures, and degenerate in terms of output. In this state, they are in effect moving toward equilibrium. When the Christendom mode of church fails to respond to outside stimuli by disengaging from the liminal experience and becomes purely self-referential, then you can be sure it is on its way out.

In other words, it has lost its missional focus, which should drive it outside its own boundaries. In so many churches the mission of the church has actually become the maintenance of the institution itself. This was never Jesus’ intention. Our goal in organizing as a people is not to set up, preserve, and maximize an institution over its life cycle, but to extend God’s mission to the world. Our primary aim is not to perpetuate the church as an institution, but to follow Jesus into his mission in the world. “Christianity is concerned with the unfolding of the Kingdom of God in this world, not the longevity of organizations.” (Easum)

When we keep the mission in mind, the organic ideas about Christianity and church life will flow quite easily. When we have the institution of the church in mind, machine-like approaches are bound to follow, because its innate mechanism of responsiveness (mission) is effectively taken out of the equation. Mission is, and must be, the organizing principle of the church.

“Laurie Guy, in an address to a pastors’ conference, spoke of the 80-10-10 formula. Some 10% of people in New Zealand regularly attend a church, a further 10% maintain a loose affiliation, while 80% are effectively outside the influence of local churches.

He notes that much of the evangelistic effort of churches is spent on the 10% with loose affiliation while we are largely out of touch with the 80%. The most obvious place where the committed 10% encounter the 80% is in the workplace. This observation is missional in the sense that it involves movement outwards from the gathered centre because those beyond the church mailing list rarely have an interest in coming to where we gather.”

- “Marketplace and Missional Church” from Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought & Practice by Derek Christensen

“In the end there are only two attitudes which Christians can adopt toward the world. One is escape and the other is engagement.”

- John Stott

In light of the previous post on “The Starfish and The Spider” here is a clip from the CBS News about the underground church in China. I think the church is a good example of at least four of the principles of decentralization shared in the book.

1. When attacked, a decentralized organization tends to become even more decentralized.

2. An open system doesn’t have central intelligence; the intelligence is spread throughout the system.

3. Open systems can easily mutate.

4. The decentralized organization sneaks up on you.

HT: journeys in between)

I recently finished reading “The Starfish and The Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations” by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom. While the book deals primarily with business issues I found the research on decentralized organizations by Brafman and Beckstrom to be very applicable to the church.

The title of the book comes from the analogous use of the starfish and the spider. A spider has eight legs coming out of a central body. It has a tiny head and eight eyes. If you cut off the spider’s head, it dies. It may survive without a leg or two or even stand to lose a couple of eyes, but it certainly can’t live without its head.

On the other hand, while a starfish may appear to be similar to the central body and multiple legs of the spider, it is really quite different. The starfish doesn’t have a head. Its central body isn’t even in charge. In fact, the major organs are replicated throughout each and every arm. If you cut the starfish in half, the animal won’t die and pretty soon you’ll have two starfish. Read the rest of this entry

There are several things to like about Dan Kimball’s book ”They Like Jesus But Not The Church.” (For a complete book review check out Wess Daniels’ gatheringinlight blog.) In the introduction Kimball presents seven basic characteristics for what it means to be missional. On page 20 he writes:

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.