My office is a wreck.  Whenever I have pictures taken in my office, I usually clean my desk and make sure the junk isn’t in the frame.

The truth is, I still don’t have my diplomas hung, my desk is covered with commentaries and projects… and junk.  My shelves aren’t full and I still have books and miscellaneous detritus in boxes in my garage.  I have files that belong in the filing cabinet, but the movers just piled them in boxes, so they are ALL out of order, and I’ve never taken time to reorganize them.

*sigh*

The one bright spot is that I have shelves that I can dedicate to books that I received from my Uncle Ross’ library after he passed away.  I remember him more often – which is a good thing, since he was well worthy of emulating – when I see those shelves as opposed to having those books scattered in with the rest of them.

If you enjoy these, feel free to check out my photoblog.

I found this from Timothy Duren via Facebook.  I don’t know who Michael or Bear are, but thanks for this.

Be sure and check out the backup singers as they look at each other, confused and guessing if it is their turn to sing.

As I have the last couple of years, I have set up a free Fantasy Football League through Yahoo.com.  If you don’t have a Yahoo ID, you can get one for free at Yahoo.com and sign in.

Then click this button:

The League Number is 361937.

The Password is “Football”.

This year we are open, again, to twenty teams, but the rosters and benches have been shortened dramatically.  This should keep the talent pool with plenty of options available throughout the season and keep it pretty competitive.

Hope to see you there!  The Draft will be set after the teams are full.

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Ok, ok.  So, I said yesterday’s post would be the last one in this series, at least for a while.  Overnight is a while, right?

I forgot that I had not addressed the size of the church and its relationship to its ability to be Missional.  Suffice it to say, this will be the last post in this series.  For a while.  Or at least until the mood hits me.

So…  Mega churches.  Can they be Missional?

I think it is important to understand the nature of mega churches in the first place before we can answer that question.  In fact, once we understand the nature of the church, it becomes easy to answer this question.

Mega churches took off during the “Church Growth Movement” and became the ideal of every pastor and every church.  Part of this is tied to the American culture that teaches us all that “bigger is better” and that we must “keep up with the Jones’.”  We see this mentality at work when there is a gathering of pastors who end up asking one another, “Whatchya runnin’ these days?”  whereupon, the inevitable comparisons begin.  The goal, of course, is to wait as long as possible to answer the question so that you can evaluate everyone else in the room and fudge your numbers accordingly. This will ensure that you are at or near the top of the heap.

The euphmism that we’ve coined to describe this act is called, “Ministerially Speaking.”

Right.  To “speak as a minister” is to lie to your fellow church leaders about the flock you shepherd so that they will respect you more, even though the respect is falsely garnered.

Which reveals just how ungodly and unbiblical the motivation to be a bigger church really is, or, at least, can be.  It also reveals how internally focused the mega church tends to be and that becomes a barrier to engaging those around us.

The reality of the mega church is that its size creates a demand for massive amounts of organizational processes.  If these processes are not maintained, the organization breaks down and the entity becomes smaller because of the confusion.  A church will only grow to the point that the organization can facilitate its size.  To be mega, then, you must be highly organized.

To be organized on the scale of a mega church, you need a bureaucracy of some sort, and that tends to become … ta da … institutional.

I’m not saying that a church shouldn’t involve hundreds and even thousands of people, but if it wants to be Missional and be that large, then it has to be de-centralized.  This combats the drive to pull all of the people into one place incorporate them into the massive programs then created to keep them busy while they are there.  It also combats the tendency of people who don’t become assimilated into the programs from falling through the cracks.

If people come into the church through personal relationships that then pull them into a small group setting, then the large corporate worship service, it is hard for them to fall through the cracks, since they are integrated into the body before they hit the door of the church.

There is also the issue of church planting.

A growing Missional Church will have as its goal its own ability to reproduce, which gives it a natural way to keep itself from becoming a bureaucratic institution.  If it has, as a part of its DNA, a trigger that causes it to peel off a section of its own leaders and workers to create another church, then size never drives it to institutionalism.

Two miscellaneous thoughts about this.  (1) The more decentralized the church, the less need to check its size and planting can become more strategic missionality and not just the drive to stay lean.  (2) The recent drive of mega churches to reproduce as mega churches with satellite campuses strikes me as a need to reproduce while still maintaining control.  This enables them to count all those in attendance in “their” column, revealing, in my mind, a motivation that is not healthy – if I am correct in assessing their motives.  If they really want to reproduce, it would seem to me that they would let them go, so that they can then reproduce, which becomes an exponential factor of reproduction rather than an additional factor.

I’m not totally convinced satellite locations are “bad” because it is possible that those churches couldn’t do what the central campus can do for them… but it does seem to lead to a sense of institutionalism and it definately leads to people falling through the cracks – at least in my experience.

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This will be the last post in this series, at least for a while.  Later this week, I’ll be posting an open invitation to the Blogtown Football League for Fantasy Football on yahoo.  It’s free if you have a yahoo id – which is also free.  I’ll tell you more about all of that later.

So… service.  The Institutional Church often falls into the trap of looking at people as existing to serve the Institution and its programs.  We see “prospects” as potential leaders, workers, attenders and tithers, which is an obvious violation of God’s plan.  The way we get there is the belief that the church is the solution to their problems rather than God being all in all to them.

We most often see this reflected when white collar professionals move into town or visit our churches and they get visits, phone calls and personal attention from the Pastor himself, while folks less well dressed and connected often fall through the cracks.  Why? certain ones fit the needs of the Institution and others don’t.

On the other hand, when the Missional Church acts as servants of its community, it opens doors to conversation and the Gospel.

We need to ask the question:  Who is supposed to be serving whom?

Further, we need to make sure that the things we offer as services to the community, that they are actually desired by the community.  This seems like an obvious statement, but we are so used to looking at everything with us at the center of the thought process, it becomes difficult.  Rather than finding out what the community needs and meeting it, we often look at what we can or want to do – what is easy for us to do – and do it, expecting the community to be grateful.

The absolute back end of this would be if we do something to “help” the community and it actually offends them and builds a wall instead.  At that point, we create a backlash that hurts everything worse than if we just sat in our pew and stayed out of their way.

This wall is often built when we “intrude” on them.  We had some neighbors of our church in Kentucky that dubbed our church Fort God, because they perceived that we were all about ourselves and didn’t care about our neighbors.  We would have an annual Fall Festival where we would seal off the parking lot, hoist light rigs and set up booths all over the place, inviting the community for a safe, free and family oriented event.  What we didn’t anticipate was that people would park all down the streets in a “less-than-considerate” way.  Meaning they clogged the thin streets and parked across driveways making it nearly impossible for our neighbors to navigate the path to their own homes.

So, then, it is vital for the Missional Church to accurately understand what it can do to serve the community without becoming a burden to the community.

As we seek to be Missional, our responsibility is to engage people in every arena, whether near or far, to which God gives us access.  God has opened a door for us to be such in Vietnam.  Here are a vew of my favorite pics.

You can see these and more at my photoblog or flickr account.

[Show as slideshow]

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In the Institutional Church, Small Groups are often used for discipleship (with a little fellowship on the side) – and it works.  I am not convinced that many who do use Small Groups really understand why they are effective.  It has been my experience that they do it because it works elsewhere and are content to do what is “new” and works.

And that’s a real shame, because Small Groups can be so much more than that.

When Small Groups are simply discipleship oriented, as they are in a typically Institutional Church, they are merely extensions of the center serving as a program of the church.

A centralized Institutional Church is one that may do small groups.

A de-centralized Missional Church is one that is small groups.

And those Small Groups take on more than discipleship adding evangelism, fellowship – worship, to some degree – and, most importantly… ministry.  And remember, ministry is evangelism, especially in our culture.

Small Groups in a Missional Church become Missional fellowships that work together as its individuals mobilize and recruit one another to projects and relationships.  This makes group ministry lean and mean, fighting against bureaucratic sluggishness and excess.

Moreover, these Small Groups are much more accessible to those outside the church, building the sphere of influence.  This allows for some level of attractionality to work starting first with the individual as they invite friends into the Small Group.

So then, the ministry and evangelism breakdown is this:  the individual is primary in service, relationships and the spread of the Gospel across every possible avenue; the small group follows in service, relationships and the spread of the Gospel in more narrow avenues, but ones that are more than the large institution can accomplish effectively; followed finally by the larger body that streamlines its programs in order to stay as lean as possible and do whatever it chooses to do as well as it possibly can be done.

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Walking through the hall the other day I found some cards in a card rack.  Apparently, I had missed them over the last two years, but others had been missing them for the last 30… maybe 40 years?  I scanned them and here they are.

Enjoy.

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The job of Missional Pastors is to facilitate the function of the church.  If a high ratio of the mobile individual is the chief structural difference between the Institutional and Missional Church, then the it is the job of the church’s Pastor(s) to exemplify, encourage, direct, instruct and get out of the way of the people so that they can do just that.

One of our church’s homegrown Pastors, Michael Harrison, who is now in Virginia was in town recently and spoke to us of the church plant he now pastors.  In that talk, he mentioned that many churches do so many things that they don’t do any of them well.  At his church, they focus on just a few group projects and try to do them with excellence.

This illustrates the problem we have with over programmed churches, typical of the Institutional model.  There are so many things that require workers and then they require participants, you lock up the people within the Institution and they have no time nor energy to mobilize themselves in the world.  They are too obligated to the overgrown structure.

Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger hit on this in their book, Simple Church.

Simplification of our programming, reducing it, is a great example of us getting out of the way of the individual, which helps us to become a more Missional congregation.

In the front window of our church’s library, are these books:  The Missional Leader, A Man’s Guide to the Spiritual Disciplines, Glocalization, UnChristian, The Divine Conspiracy, Simple Church, To The Ends of the Earth and Journeys.  Most of these I have referenced from the pulpit.  This is just one attempt to facilitate the growth and mobilization of our individuals.

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Concluding the major layout of the differences between the Institutional Church and the Missional Church is the discussion of the inherent natural paths of the individual structures.  That is to say, let’s look at the way each church structure goes about its business, which is dictated by its structure.

As a primarily centralized structure and primarily attractional in nature, the Institutional Church is forced to operate in a centrifugal fashion.  In other words, the church gathered in the facility is the way the church thinks of itself as the church.  Therefore, when it disperses, its chief goal is always to come back to the center.  This is also why the Institutional church seeks to have as many opportunities to gather as it possibly can.  When it is not succeeding in gathering and the numbers of those gathered decline, it feels that it is failing and attempts to be more attractive to increase the number of those gathered.

Institutional Church

As the Institutional Church disperses, the individuals frequently take the church’s barriers with them and stay separated from the world around them until they can get back to the gathering.  When they do engage those who are outside of the church structure, the typical engagement is to simply invite the person to come to the centralized gathering – which I have noted is not that attractive to those already outside the structure, so it often fails.

I never will forget the time in Kentucky when some of the county’s smaller churches decided that what our community needed was an association wide tent revival.  They loved it.  All the local gatherings joining for one big central gathering.  The fact that it brought back memories of their heyday, complete with numerous joint choir specials, old time Gospel hymns and a screaming preacher didn’t hurt their enthusiasm, either.

But that’s not the story.  The real story was when the Director of Missions (the head of our local Baptist association of churches, for those non-Baptists out there), a local Minister of Music and I were playing golf on Thursday (my day out of the office at the time).  We ran across a young man who was playing alone and picked him up as part of our group.  Turned out that he was a newly imported Assistant Manager at our local Wal-Mart.  He was from Ohio.  After a couple of holes, I asked him where he worked and he told me and then reciprocated by asking us where we worked.  When he found out that we were ministers, he kind of raised an eyebrow and started watching us a little differently.  As we drew close to the parting of the ways, just a couple of holes later, our DOM decided that he didn’t want to let the opportunity pass, so he told our new friend about the big tent revival we were having and invited him to come out the next week, if he could make it at all.  “You’ll hear some good sangin’ and some good preechin’.  Y’ought to come on out.”

At this, my heart sank, and the look on this young man’s face told the whole story.  Not only would he be avoiding that tent like the plague, he’d be avoiding us on the golf course as well.  I looked him up in the store and had a couple of golf conversations with him, trying to reestablish that connection on a more common ground.  I even played with him again during the next year, but I just couldn’t get past the damage done on the 8th green (we were playing the front nine last, for you golfers out there).

In contrast to this, the Missional Church considers itself the church even when it is reduced in number to the individual.  This is the primary concept behind trying to mobilize every individual and the great barrier to transitioning from Institutional to Missional.  As the Institutional Church thinks of itself as the church when it is gathered it thinks of itself as tied to its location and the times that it gathers.  The individuals of the Missional Church would think of themselves as the church (incarnational) at all times and therefore, at all places.

Missional Church

This brings the church to thinking of itself as existing primarily among society which facilitates engagements with what Bob Roberts calls the “domains” of society.  Examples of domains are:  Medical, the Arts, Politics, Education, Infrastructure, Social Work, etc.  Within all of these domains are infinite numbers of sub-domains that are more specific, such as Pediatrics and Geriatrics being part of the Medical domain.  They also cross over to the Social Work domain to some degree (more so in Vietnam where indigent elderly are housed in the same facility as orphans).

The upshot of this is that the Gospel is spread among relationships that exist as natural consequences when the Missional individual perceives himself/herself as the church wherever and whenever they are.  The nurse is a missionary to her patients, patient’s families, fellow nurses, doctors and even the odd Hospital Administrator.  In this way, the church exists in society and can become a change agent, much more easily than the church that seeks to woo uninterested and disconnected people from afar.

The gathering of the Missional church, then, is seen by its members as a centripetal force.  As they exist primarily across the infrastructure of society, they are periodically drawn together for corporate worship, fellowship, larger service projects, discipleship to some degree and even evangelism.

Because the Missional Church is not driven to build the centralized gathering, it is comfortable gathering in various places and times as well as in gathering in a variety of sizes:  two or three for accountability, 6-12 for a home group Bible Study, several home groups for a larger project, etc.

At every level, the barriers to the unchurched are smaller than at the next largest level simply because of size.  Therefore, as people come in contact with the individual and have multiple conversations that are bent toward the Gospel, the Missional Church, though not primarily attractional, becomes more attractive at various points.

The end of all of this is not that the Missional Church does so many different things than the Institutional Church, but that it does similar things with a different mindset, and, therefore, does them differently.  It also does them more effectively.

To synopsize, the Institutional Church meets as often as it can with the goal of increasing the number of its participants in the centralized meeting.  When it goes out, it has the goal of returning with more participants.  Our society doesn’t really want to particpate in this function and so the Institutional church is in decline.

The Missional Church is driven to meet by the draw of the Holy Spirit toward other believers, but sees its primary task as the relationship with those around each individual.  Their sphere of influence is used by God to draw the unchurched in to Himself and then the church, using the individual’s sphere of influence.