Erin & Kay ready to begin picking up litter

Did we meet the woman at the well? In the course of picking up litter, Kay & I got to pray for a woman who told us, “The man I’m with, he’s not my husband.”

The project

“I’m a Christian, too. But I’m… backslidden.”

Our church is preparing to move into its own facility. As part of the preparations, a “scout team” was formed to pray through our new neighborhood, learning its needs, and finding ways to minister. We don’t want to be a church that isn’t actually part of the neighborhood. We want to be good neighbors, blessing the community in Jesus’ name. 

On a recent Saturday, we had a project to pick up litter in the immediate vicinity of our new building. My family — me, Kay, and our daughter Erin — formed one of the litter teams. Our assigned area was the other side of the street, heading south. As we picked up trash, I waved hello to anyone who noticed us, and prayed for personal encounters. The recycling center one block south was a particularly friendly area. People going in said hello. One worker thanked us: “You guys are awesome!”

The woman

A woman outside the recycling center greeted me, asking what group we were with. I said we were with The River Church Community. I pointed down the street and said, “We’ll be moving into that building soon.” I explained that we were picking up litter to bless the neighborhood, and to meet our new neighbors.

The man who was with her told her to stop bothering me. She said, “It’s OK, this is Jon, he says he’s here to meet people.” She then began telling me, “I’m a Christian, too. But I’m… backslidden.” I didn’t ask what she meant by that, but waved Kay over. We asked if we could “pray for you right now.” Kay, removing her latex gloves, laid a hand on her shoulder.

As we prayed, the woman said, “I’m married. But the man I’m with, he’s not my husband.” She kept judging herself saying, “I know it ain’t right,” but we kept telling her that God loved her and hadn’t left her. Kay then felt she had received a specific word from the Lord, and shared it: “Daddy wants you back.” The woman began to cry, and thanked us.

Lessons learned

If I’d had the training on Disciple Making Movements before this encounter, I would have known better how to bless this woman, possibly teaching her how to become a disciple of Jesus. But it was still powerful! And now, with what I’m learning from Cityteam, I’m going to continue to look for ways to bless people in Jesus’ name, praying that he will lead me to hearts he has prepared.

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Running together, not solo

I’ve written about Cityteam before, and how they reshaped their entire organization around Church Planting Movements, where the good news of Jesus Christ spreads virally. We hear of such movements around the world, but they’re the only group I know of that has seen true viral growth here in North America. So when they take what they’ve learned in the past few years and turn it into training, I pay attention!

They changed the term from CPM to Disciple Making Movements. And they’re calling this training idisciple Seminars. These include Awareness Seminars (a brief introduction) and Basic Training (hands-on). Is your city on the list?

• Lake Oswego, OR
• Portland
• Lawrenceville, GA
• San Jose
• Philadelphia
• Minneapolis

I’m clearing my calendar for the San Jose training! What about you? Check out their training events page.

Simple steps empower us

Don’t be put off by the stodgy video at the bottom of that page, which talks about “process” and “steps.” Remember when John Wimber boiled healing prayer down to the Five Step Model? It’s kind of like that: it sounds rigid and clinical. But judging from the powerful book Miraculous Movements: How Hundreds of Thousands of Muslims Are Falling in Love with Jesus, it’s anything but rigid. The process & steps are there to provide a framework of simplicity, which is important for anything to spread. But behind and through that framework, Cityteam has learned how to teach normal people how to experience the power of the Holy Spirit through obedience to Christ. And remember, when I say “normal people” I mean “people who aren’t believers like us”!

So the Basic Training in San Jose will be spread across several Saturday afternoons: March 2nd, March 9th, April 6th, April 13th & April 20th. Who’s in with me?

Photo by Stacy Braswell (license)

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For Halloween this year, I decided to dress up to make distributing candy more fun. But we only had a trickle of trick-or-treaters. With time to kill, I went to hang out with a spontaneous clump of neighbors.

The older couple next door who has lived here the longest said, “Oh, back in the day, we used to have lots of kids come through.”

“What happened to change that?” I asked.

“Well, churches and schools started hosting Halloween events, you know.”

And it hit me. In an effort to create “safe Halloween” events, these groups are sucking the life out of neighborhoods.

Is Halloween unsafe?

What’s the underlying cause of the fear?
Not knowing our neighbors.

What’s up with “safe Halloween,” anyway? Was it ever dangerous? Sure, I understand that some people live in high-crime areas, and need to exercise caution. But not your rank-and-file middle-class folks. No, I’m talking about the boogeymen of Halloween: the poisoned candy, the apples with razor blades, the abductors in the dark.

Even when a neighbor brought her son over to our house, she verbally approved our candy as he reached for it, saying, “We trust you.”

But this stuff is either urban legend, or way overblown. Do you know anyone who has suffered from poisoned candy or razor blades? I didn’t think so. And if you have the sad occasion to know someone who was abducted, did it happen on Halloween night? What are the odds? No greater than any on other night.

Overreacting to unfounded fear is natural. But by promoting “safe Halloween” events, our churches and schools actually feed that fear. And what’s the underlying cause of the fear in the first place?

Not knowing our neighbors.

So what do these events do?

They pull kids away from their neighborhoods.

In other words, we’re making the problem worse.

Safe Halloween: Break the fear, be missional

While Halloween is fresh, I encourage you to get out and talk with your neighbors. There’s no guilt, no casting blame here — I’ve been part of the problem before. But see if you can have a conversation about your neighborhood, safety, and creating stronger community. What do they think? How would they feel about beefing up the neighborhood?

And let’s talk about Halloween with folks in our Jesus communities. If your church hosts a Halloween event, ask yourselves why. Attractional and missional aren’t completely incompatible, but instead of trying to draw people out of their neighborhoods, wouldn’t it feel more like Jesus to send people into their own neighborhoods?

And let’s not even talk about “church alternatives to Halloween”…

Photo by Brittany Randolph (license)

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[This is the conclusion of Starting New Churches: Is Our Focus Misplaced?]

“Planting new churches is the most effective evangelistic methodology known under heaven.” You can’t read any church planting material without bumping into that quote. Repeatedly. Hey, C. Peter Wagner said it, so that settles it.

Or does it?

The quote is completely woven into the mindset of North American church planting. Suggesting that it’s wrong may be tantamount to evangelical heresy. But wIth all due respect to Wagner (it was through reading his books on healing that I first learned of John Wimber and the Vineyard movement)… I’m sorry. It’s wrong. It’s backwards.

Correlation vs. causation: Get it straight

For everyone who’s ever repeated the quote, I want you to come back with me and remember some basic science. Repeat after me: “Correlation doesn’t imply causation. Correlation doesn’t imply causation.”

Wagner was taught by Donald McGavran, the grand-daddy of “church growth” who used statistical analysis to figure out what “worked” and “didn’t work.” And I have no doubt that statistics show that wherever new churches are planted, evangelism increases. But think about it. When a new church is starting up, what does the core team do?

Well, first of all, they don’t start weekly services right away. They might not have weekly services for months. Instead, the core team is trying to “get out there.” That includes things like:

• Meeting a lot of people, getting to know their spiritual background
• Servant evangelism (like free car washes) to demonstrate the heart of God
• Having a booth at the local farmer’s market, or at the local New Age festival
• Throwing parties in a neighborhoods
• Lots and lots of prayer for meaningful encounters

These are the kinds of things the core teams of new churches focus on at first, while they’re “just getting established.” Gee, that all sounds like… evangelism.

New churches shift away from evangelism

Most of the energy gets directed to serving the service.

Unfortunately, once enough people have been gathered, things change. The focus of the core team shifts to putting on a worship service. The more exciting and creative this service needs to be, the more effort it requires from the most creative and dedicated members of the church. The service becomes the nexus. Most of the energy, and even most of the people’s spiritual gifts, gets directed to serving the service. That initial push of evangelism fades.

Eventually, the pastor starts saying, “It’s time to plant another new church.” Why? “Because planting new churches is the most effective evangelism.”

Yeah.

What if it’s not church planting at all that reaches new people? What if it’s reaching new people that reaches new people? This may sound dumb, but… what if effective evangelism comes from your faith community actually focusing their prayers and efforts on evangelism?

Whaddaya think?

Photo by emilio labrador (license)

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Well, I did manage to turn 50.

I’m 5!

If you look closely, you’ll see the cake has a hill. Yes, as in “over the.”

I was thoroughly celebrated by many friends. One of my brothers sent a mysterious gift which turned out to be a koto! (You can think of it as a Japanese floor harp.)

Rockin’ the koto

I love music, and several friends gave me iTunes gift cards. There’s a vast amount of music I associate with special memories, but that I don’t own. Their gifts helped me get back in touch with some of it:

• Porcupine Tree: In Absentia
• Genesis: Nursery Cryme
• Emerson Lake & Palmer: Welcome Back, My Friends, to the Show that Never Ends
• Todd Rundgren: Initiation
• Renaissance: Azure d’Or
• The Alan Parsons Project: I Robot
• Genesis: Foxtrot
• Gentle Giant: Freehand
• Todd Rundgren: Hermit of Mink Hollow
• Radiohead: Hail to the Thief
• Peter Gabriel: So

Maybe she’s just paying homage to the old man, but I’m pleased to hear a few of these albums playing from my teenage daughter’s room. (But she’s still healthy, deeming some of them “too weird.”)

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The Gathering Formerly Known As the Soliton Sessions

Nine years ago, I drove myself to Ventura, California for the first of the Soliton Sessions. I went at the invitation of an online friend I’d never met. I didn’t know what to expect.

It saved my faith.

The Sessions became an annual pilgrimage for me. I’d never experienced a “conference” that was really centered more on community, conversation, and opening to divine imagination. As I wrote for the Next-Wave e-zine, “It wasn’t so much a conference as a reunion of a family I never knew I had.”

The Soliton Sessions are dead. Long live the Sideways Sessions!

After a hiatus of a several years, I’m excited to learn that the Sessions are back! The name has changed to the Sideways Sessions, and the location has changed to Portland, Oregon. And I’m bummed that I can’t make it. …But maybe you can!

As with previous gatherings, the Sideways Sessions limit the number of people involved in order to promote conversation. I know it’s only two weeks away, but… pray about it. Does God want you there?

The Sideways Sessions
September 13 – 15, 2012
Portland, OR

For more info, go to the registration site. And let me know if you go. I’d love to hear about it.

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Big Nerd Ranch

In March, I flew out to Atlanta. There, I spent a week at Big Nerd Ranch for their Advanced iOS Programming class:

A really great group of people

I’m a Big Nerd now! I even have a T-shirt that says, “Achieve Nerdvana.”

Dr. King Memorial

When the Advanced iOS class finished, my coworkers and I had a little time to before the return flight. We settled on going to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. To my surprise, the first person to greet us at the memorial was Mahatma Gandhi:

Gandhi welcomes visitors to the MLK museum

The whole memorial was deeply moving. Christ is tangibly present in the work of MLK and the civil rights movement. But there’s also a personal connection: my father marched with Dr. King. When I spoke with my dad about visiting the memorial, he told me more about his experience…

My dad saw men who had brought bats, ready for action.

One of my dad’s professors at Harvard Divinity School had gone on an earlier march. At Dr. King’s request, he recruited students to go down to Selma. But the professor shared his surprise at what the pre-march briefing was like. “Instead of a stirring speech about how we were leading the world, the preparation was very practical: How to use your arms to protect your head. How to stuff newspapers under your hat to prevent injury when you’re hit by clubs.”

So my father left for the march. During the march, he linked arms with a black woman on his left. He was on the rightmost edge of marchers. As he walked, he saw men who had brought bats, ready for action. My dad told me he tried to stare them down, hoping to instill some shame in them. How like him (and me)! But the woman on his left yanked his arm and told him, “Keep your head front and your eyes down!”

My dad goes by his middle name, but is sometimes called by a formal title: Reverend James Reid.
In the news, my mother heard that “a Reverend James Reeb” had been killed in the violence.
Reid. Reeb. Remember, this all gets fuzzed over A.M. radio. My mother was sure he was dead.

And then, to her astonishment, he walked in the front door.

Weird thought: I might not have grown up with a father. Our family of four kids had a dad. But another family of four kids lost their dad.

So I’m thankful to Dr. King, to James Reeb and his family, and to all the brave practitioners of non-violence:
For their work and sacrifice.
For showing what the kingdom of God is like.
For the difference they made.
For their example of following Jesus no matter the cost.

At Ebenezer Baptist, where Dr. King preached!

At the tomb, my heart full of gratitude

Have you been to the MLK Memorial in Atlanta? What was your experience there?

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Bill Maher, that mocker of religion who created the mockumentary Religulous, had a few choice words for evangelical Christians:

New rule: If you’re a Christian who supports killing your enemies, and torture, you have to come up with a new name for yourself.

…But you see, I can say that, because I’m a non-Christian — just like most Christians.

If you’re easily offended: take a pass.
The rest of you: discuss.

Related: Osama bin Laden’s Death, and Dr. Who

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Jon: [slight pause as I process what she said] …Hey, waitaminit. I haven’t been married 26 years for nothing. I recognize that! That’s one of those… women’s trick phrases, isn’t it?

Kay: Yes, you could be right.

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New churches are stuck in a box we made

This is a continuation of Starting New Churches: Is Our Focus Misplaced? Two friends discussing church planting led me to wonder: Is church planting really “the most effective form of evangelism” in America? If so, I think we could do much better.

New churches: One size doesn’t fit all

The American landscape is continuing to shift away from any “Christianized” identity. Welcome to post-Christian America. The rules have changed, and America is a completely different mission field. Alan Hirsch teaches, “All mission in the West is cross-cultural.”

Revealing Jesus in a new context requires new approaches. So why do new churches keep going back to the “tried and true”? You know the old definition of insanity. By that definition, we American Christians are nuts about establishing new churches — specifically, church services.

New churches outside the box: They exist!

There are plenty of alternative examples around the globe. As I wrote before, we can’t just copy what we see elsewhere. But I’m not content to shrug and say, “It doesn’t work here.” Especially because I know one group here in the Bay Area has planted self-reproducing, home-based, lay-led groups. These groups are successfully growing through natural non-church relationships (oikos). Groups are spawning new groups, which in turn are spawning new groups, so it is a multiplying movement.

But this is happening among our urban poor. The groups are largely Hispanic. What about the more-or-less wealthy suburbanites? (Or is that hard soil, and I’m wasting my time? I don’t think so.)

Stuck in the box of Christendom: It’s mutual

Christianity was once a radical group. But thanks to our heritage of Christendom, where Christianity lost its fringe status to become the center of power and culture, we are burdened by pre-existing ideas of what churches are, look like, and do.

What’s curious about post-Christian culture is that these preconceptions are held by both Christians and non-Christians alike. We’re both locked inside the same box. This makes it doubly difficult to go off the beaten path to create alternative Jesus communities.

How do you contextualize the good news of Jesus when the people of that context expect Jesus safely boxed in a church service? I’ve tried to help my friends see beyond their ideas of church, but maybe that’s going in the wrong direction.

I think we need to unleash Jesus, apart from “church.” (And by “church” I specifically mean “the church service.”)

Coming alive to an unleashed Jesus

In the past nine months or so, Kay & I have each experienced spiritual renewal. Our hearts have come alive again. The Scriptures are chewy and rich. The leading of the Holy Spirit is real. We’re part of a church community that is deeper than we expected, and we’ve only just dipped our toes in.

We don’t know what God is up to in our lives. But I think it’s safe to say: Jesus is being unleashed in our lives.

Photo by sbisson (license)

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