Archive for March, 2012

Why is Missional Church in a Small Church a Little Like Pro Baseball in Oakland?

{ March 20, 2012 @ 3:39 pm } · { Subject and Object: Sermons and Interactions }
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Why is Missional Church in a Small Church a Little Like Pro Baseball in Oakland?

(Or, Why is the Institutional Church More Like Pro Baseball Than it is Like the Early Church?)

Okay, fair warning. This is probably going to tick a lot of people off. And it is probably going to tick off a lot of people who are much smarter than me…and much more powerful than me.

Anyone who’s seen “Moneyball” probably knows a little bit about the woes of relative financial poverty that have plagued the Oakland A’s through the years. But everyone who’s seen that film also knows that money is not the only way to play ball. For a long time, the Oakland A’s were kind of like an extension of the minor leagues because as soon as a player got good, they would go to bigger market teams because that’s where the money was. The A’s couldn’t afford to keep them. The conventional wisdom of the league was that big-name players making big money won more games than teams that could not afford either big names or big money. Then along came Billy Beane who was desperate and fed up with losing, and he started looking at the metrics behind the game and realized that it wasn’t really big names or big money that won games. It was something much more subtle. It was on-base percentages. And a lot of the players with the highest on-base percentages were languishing in obscurity and could be put to work for a lot less money (and with a lot more gratitude and humility) than big-name players who cost a lot and were largely prima donnas. Billy and the A’s changed baseball when nobody thought anyone could ever change baseball.

Small congregations have, for the longest time, been kind of like the minor leagues for the big churches. In institutional circles, the small churches stay small, and the big churches are like flagships for the denomination. Historically, small churches bring in someone early in their career and allow them to develop, but as soon as they really get good at what they’re doing and really hit their stride, they move on to the bigger church with the bigger salary. Often, they have to in order to pay for the loans they took to get the big-name diploma that got them a look from those bigger churches to begin with. When the talent leaves, the church is right back to square one with the wind once again knocked out of it and wondering whether they have it in them to try it one more time. They buy into the conventional wisdom. They have it sold to them by denominational representatives schooled in it themselves who are coaching them through the interim processes. They get their hope behind the big-name pro, and when he or she trades up, they once again find themselves back in the emotional and spiritual basement. It’s the way that the institutional church has worked. It is what a “career track” looks like in conventional thinking. The conventional thinking is that you have to have a big-name preacher with a diploma from a big-name institution using a whole lot of expensive theological words that nobody really understands but are sort of like a bona fides for ecclesial legitimacy.

The question that I am wrestling with is, “What is the actual metric that small churches should be looking for in candidate for pastor?” The sad truth is that denominations don’t even give small churches a look at people who might be the right person because denominations have their own metrics that suit their needs but may have nothing to do with what might actually be the right metric for smaller churches. It’s like the denominational “scouts” are only looking at their version of the Division 1 programs. The denominational gatekeepers are looking at diplomas…they require them. A candidate will not get full accreditation in most denominations without one. Without diplomas, people of great giftedness don’t even make the first cut. And yet, time and time again, in the reality on the ground, a diploma has proven to be a very bad metric for predicting actual performance. It certainly wasn’t diplomas that enabled the original disciples to grow the Kingdom. And it certainly was not the institutionally recognized credentials of the day that Jesus used in selecting those first disciples and apostles. In fact, it can be well-argued that Jesus specifically chose people who had not made the institutional cut.

So if expensive academic credentials are not a good predictor of performance, what is? What did Jesus look for in the people that he first called to “Follow me”? What produces fruit for the Kingdom? I would argue that if a person didn’t produce fruit from the harvest BEFORE they got that piece of paper, then they most likely are not going to produce fruit from the harvest AFTER they get it, either. Peter never got a diploma. What he got was spiritual giftedness…and real-deal faith. Seminaries do not bestow spiritual gifts, and they do not have mechanisms for recognizing them either. I am not sure that it is part of their purpose to do that. It is spiritual giftedness that produces fruit from the harvest, not intelligence measured by academic performance. Most seminaries worth their salt admit that right up front. I am not saying that there is no place for academic preparation. What I am proposing is that small churches need to be reaching their mission fields in highly effective ways, and they need to be making new disciples, not attracting highly-educated Christians who appreciate a brilliantly nuanced sermon. For small churches, the critical metric is not the ability to please people who are already in the overflowing pews; nor is it to compete with other churches in attracting people who are already in the faith to sit in their pews. The critical metric for small churches is the ability to reach completely unreached people groups who are not in the pews yet. The metrics that measure that ability are not in current use in any denomination that I know of. I’m not even sure that any of us know what those metrics are. However, many of us are at least starting to look for them because the effectiveness of our mission depends on it.

The first thing a small congregation should be asking is not, “Where did you go to graduate school?” It shouldn’t even be, “Did you go to graduate school?” It is, “Where did you bring your first person into the Kingdom of God and exactly what did that look like?” A better indicator of a good fit for a small congregation would be to ask a candidate what vocational success looks like to them. How would they know that they’ve been successful? If their answer is largely couched in terms related to institutional advancement, and metrics related to reaching the already-reached, then they are probably not going to be successful or happy for very long in the small church environment. They are going to be looking to impress the larger congregations that will be offering them the next step up. They will do their time, and then they will look for the bigger and better deal. If, however, their response is about reaching the lost for the Kingdom of God and leading others to do the same, then they will not need to go looking elsewhere for their next step. Their spiritual giftedness will allow them to grow into the next step right there in that small congregation as that once small congregation grows the Kingdom of God all around it. Will they need education? Yes. But they can get it along the way as it makes sense for what they are called to do.

Is your community looking for a new leader? If so, what are you looking for in that leader? What will be the measure by which you will judge the leader’s potential to lead your community into the future that God is preparing for it?

The Surfer, the Sea, and Missional Transformation in the Small Church Environment: Chapter V

{ March 10, 2012 @ 11:38 pm } · { Footsteps }
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This is the last post of a series I first posted two years ago.

Chapter V – Urgency

At some point the metaphor breaks down. There is something that needs to be said and deeply understood that a surfing metaphor simply can’t get at. Surfing is fun, and there is something at stake in what we’re about here that is serious business. I think we can have fun in the mission. I very often do. There is abundant joy to be found in this faith. That being said, there is also a seriousness to all of this that we must wake every follower and every church up to. For far too long Satan has had his way with churches. And he hasn’t had his way by making churches suffer. He has simply put them to sleep. He has simply managed to get churches so distracted from what’s really at stake that they all too often have begun to think that the most important item on the agenda is whether or not there will be enough food at the next fellowship potluck, or whether or not the tablecloths will match the napkins at the next church social. Satan has managed to bury the church in such minutiae, that they have even broken up and split over styles of worship and details of doctrine that are frankly silly when they are compared to the gravity of the task that Jesus himself set before the Church. Every single day that churches spend arguing over silly things, and investing their energies in self-serving distractions people die in their addictions. Every day that we forget why we are here, people have their marriages fail and families crumble because they have no idea of what marriage really is because no one has ever reached them with the Way to life and love and joy. Every day that churches waste arguing about organs or guitars, people live lives of the deepest suffering right outside our doors. People die, kids are lost to gangs and drugs and alcohol, and souls are lost forever.

A lie that small churches fall prey to is the one that says that what our congregation wants matters. Too many meetings center on this question in various forms: “What do we want?” A wrong question always yields a wrong answer. The truth of the matter is that nowhere in Scripture is the Church, any church, asked what it wants. The only question that matters and the only one that will lead anywhere in the Kingdom of God is, “What does God want of this church?”

What God wants from us is laid out in Scripture: “Matthew 28:19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” This is serious stuff. What is at stake in it is everything. No metaphor can contain its gravity. Perhaps we look too broadly at it…too philosophically. And maybe the stories I have related about the realities of urban ministry and street ministry are examples that just don’t fit your ministry or mission context. So let me try relate to you one of my greatest failures, one of my most excruciating lessons, and in doing so, help to illuminate the urgency of this passage. It did not happen in the worst neighborhood of the city, although it happens there all the time. It happened right across the street. Before I tell you this, I need to tell you something else. I have seen literally hundreds, if not a thousand people come into the Kingdom of God. I have witnessed the saving hand of Christ grab people by the soul and yank them out of hell instantly and forever. I do not remember all of their names. The truth be told, I do not even remember all of their faces. But I remember every name and every face of every person I have seen lost to the grave because I failed to act. I remember them because I am responsible for them, and I will one day stand before my Lord and Savior and answer for their loss. There are no excuses. Not for me, and not for anyone who claims to serve Christ.

Ten Thousand Miles I Never Reached Across

I didn’t even know she came to the door. Jackie, my wife, talked to her outside. We didn’t know her accept to say “hi” or to wave in passing. She and her husband and son had moved in across the street two years before this day. A lot of well-meant thoughts of getting together had come and gone without action. You might know how that goes. “We need to call them to get together.” And then another week goes by.

I walked into the living room, an ordinarily busy day behind me, as Jackie came in from outside. Jackie had a stunned look on her face. “That was ______ from across the street. They buried Ben (her son) last Saturday. He killed himself.” Boom. Stunned. Silence. I don’t know what moved her to cross ten thousand miles of street like that to tell us of her unbearable loss. There are so many inexplicable facets of grief. We had been out of town during the time that Ben took his life and was buried. We almost never took a five day vacation like that. We needed to put our troubles behind. I guess I forgot that we can’t really do that when our primary trouble is that we live in a world where young people kill themselves. I don’t know why yet, but the first emotion I felt when Jackie told me about Ben was guilt. I stood before God having failed to reach the boy across the street. And here I stand today. Had I been so focused on seeing our church grow that I had forgotten that life is lived between the blades of grass?

I had met Ben once. He was kind of Goth or at least dressed a little that way, obviously sensitive and bright, and vulnerable. I met his eyes during that encounter and I could see him hoping for something I can’t yet name. A pensive expectancy? An anxious hope of acceptance? Was he reaching out to me for something? I don’t know. I waved at him each time I saw him out in his yard, but that one encounter was the only time I ever spoke to him. He lived across the street and ten thousand miles away. His mother said that he had a few very dear friends. I am now profoundly sorry that I never made a concerted effort to be one of them. My vision for reaching out to young people had been the one I was taught in seminary – to build a group from within the church that I could connect people to. Our youth group had come apart and died in pathological conflict about the time I met Ben. In my mind, I had nothing to connect Ben to, to invite him to. I did not see that that was no excuse for missing someone’s pain. So many lofty conversations had been taking up my time. “Missional Church”, “Emerging Church”, big notions of big movements. “Important” thoughts. “Important” ministries. I have a very different understanding of what is “important” now. My church at that time was in the throes of transformation. Yours may be in the midst of that now, too. My church was at war with itself. That’s a necessary part of the transformational process, but it is no excuse. What am I supposed to tell Christ when I one day meet him face to face? “Sorry, Jesus, I missed that one because the sun was in my eyes?” The church was turned inward, convulsing. We were focused on all the wrong things, and so was I. We kept asking ourselves, “What do we want?” and couldn’t figure out why that questions kept leading us into conflict and away from the mission of Christ. All that goes into leading a church to change was filling up my mind and narrowing my vision. Do not get me wrong, the church was and is filled with great people. But change is tough. It’s a war. Not bad people. Just bad stuff. I don’t mean any of that as an excuse now either.

Love and Jesus Christ are among the blades of grass. We have to get down in it and risk losing the big picture in order to find kids like Ben. Ben was not a statistic. He was not an aggregate. He was a boy dying from the disease of depression that I should have seen but I was focused on all the wrong things. I was taught in seminary that the people in the pews on Sunday morning were the congregation. But, I now know in an unforgettable way that Ben was my congregation even though he never stepped foot inside our doors. And I failed to reach him. I know something about the end of a gun. My own Ben, my odd uncle, ended his life there. So did my dad’s dad. I just didn’t see it in his eyes that day so long ago when he walked across ten thousand miles of our street so ironically named Hope Street.

I have learned in ministry not to ask questions of people in grief. Over time they have supplied me with the information that I needed in order to walk the road beside them. ______ (the mom) has not fully shared her grief with me. I have not visited enough or timely enough. Or, perhaps it simply isn’t time for me to know. There are so many things I don’t know. The usual morbid and irrelevant questions seem to come up first. But also, when she can’t catch her breath because the grief in an encounter with some relic of Ben found stuffed between the sofa cushions puts the weight of an elephant on her heart, does she feel God’s presence? What does she think she could have done that she didn’t do? Does she think she loved Ben enough? Does she beat her soul bloody in fruitless penance for a crime she didn’t commit? Where does she think Ben is now? Our faith community, this church, here is in a different place now and has been for a while. We embraced _______ (the mom), her husband, and Ben’s siblings immediately, and I have seen God do some amazing healing in them over these past years. She has made some incredibly courageous choices that have allowed God to minister to her profoundly. She is now a stakeholder in our community and is impacting our lives every day. Yet, I have not forgotten the lesson in this loss for me and for my faith community.

Ben belonged to a nation, a tribe. I never tried to reach his tribe. Goths are a tribe, a nation. “Go, and make disciples of all nations.” I fell prey to the lie that there would always be more time. I missed the urgency of the commission. I thought, “When I get a youth group back together I can invite Ben to that.” But the need was THAT day, not SOME day. The command of Christ to “Go” is an urgent command. And I did not, “Go!” I do not tell this story because I am worried about Ben’s soul. I do not embrace a God who sends people to hell who have succumbed to the fatal disease of depression. I believe that Ben is with God working out the damage done to his family and friends who loved him and lost him. And I do not tell you this story because I seek your sympathy. I do not need anyone to tell me about grace. Grace is not cheap. Christ did not allow himself to be hung on that cross because we have all the time in the world to get around to what matters. And Christ did not pull me out of hell for my own sake. Christ pulled me out of hell and, in that same moment, immediately gave me a commission – an order. “Go!”

I remember Ben’s face. I see it in my dreams. And there are others. I remember them because I never want to forget again why it is that I am here. I never want to have to answer to my Lord and Savior because I got distracted by wrong questions, or simply was afraid to reach out to someone. I want to forever be more afraid of answering to Christ than I am of being embarrassed or of failing. I am not afraid of failing. I am profoundly afraid of failing to act.

As far as I am concerned, the Church of Jesus Christ must be oriented toward the Great Commission. The mission must always drive our church. Yes, we’re to take seriously the Great Commandment – to love your neighbor as yourself. But never forget that a kid just like Ben IS your neighbor! It doesn’t matter whether your church is small or large. It doesn’t matter whether your Sunday is attendance is 2 or 2,000. It does matter whether or not your church takes seriously how urgent Christ’s commission is. It is URGENT! There is a Ben across the street or down the street from your church. There is a Ben in your classroom at school. There is someone within arm’s reach of your doors who is ostracized, marginalized, and feeling hopeless and alone – disconnected from the present Kingdom of God. And THEY are why we are here. If we have claimed Christ as our Lord and Savior, then we are already dead and buried with Christ, and we are no longer here for ourselves. It is no longer about what you or I want or don’t want. It is no longer about what you or I like or don’t like. It is about using every tool and every ounce of energy and every dollar at our disposal to accomplish what GOD wants FROM us. And what God wants from your church and from my church is simple: “Matthew 28:19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

May 20th

If I knew

A way (or away)

To make it all

Right,

That is what I would do.

If I could take

The scratches out of things, I would.

I know a way…

But it doesn’t

Make everything

Right.

It just makes it so I can

Breathe sometimes.

I remember Ben. That is

My way. Remembering.

– For _____ (Ben’s mom) , May 2o, 2008

The Surfer, the Sea, and Missional Transformation in the Small Church Environment: Chapter IV

{ March 9, 2012 @ 3:39 pm } · { Footsteps }
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Again, I first posted this two years ago to help folks who were trying to figure out what missional means in their community…and to offer some hope to small churches who were sold the lie that your community has to be “mega” to be effective…or influential (whatever the heck that is). So, here it is again. As usual, use what you want. Chuck the rest. And God be with you on the journey.

Chapter IV – Terror and Commitment: Paddling In and Popping Up

Paddling Into the Wave

Catching a wave looks a lot easier than it actually is. Even little “logs”, an East Coast term for those little rollers that are common to beach breaks in the Carolinas, travel at fifteen to twenty miles per hour. And monster waves at breaks like Jaws and Outside Log Cabins can travel at speeds of up to fifty miles per hour and faster. Big wave surfers (of which I only dream of being) catch waves by being towed into them by jet-skis because they can’t paddle fast enough to match the speed of the wave. And that is the trick. In order to catch a wave, you must be traveling at the speed of the wave when you pop up. If you are sitting still on your board or not moving fast enough, one of two things will happen. Either the wave will simply pass underneath you and leave you right where you started, or it will pick up the back end of your board and flip it end over end, sending you head first straight to the bottom. One is obviously worse than the other, but neither one is good. Catching a wave is a little bit like jumping onto a moving vehicle. You gauge the distance and start running before the vehicle gets to you so that when it gets to you, you are moving at a similar speed and can jump on. It’s kind of the same with surfing except that you are out in front of the wave instead of running along beside it. You try to gauge the distance and rate of travel, and then you paddle like mad until you feel the wave start to overtake your paddling. Then you pop up at the critical moment.

How do you know the critical moment? Experience. That is the only way to learn. Hundreds of waves pass you by and wipe you out before you just kind of get the feel. It is a sensory thing more than a knowing thing – a spatial-kinesthetic epistemology. Knowing the critical moment can only be learned by blowing it numerous times until you finally luck into one and remember what it feels like. Remember what we learned about paddling out? That’s an awful lot of extremely hard and exhausting work given that most of us fail over and over again learning how to catch a wave the first time. But as I said, and I think most surfers will affirm, there really isn’t any other way.

Missional living is kind of the same way. Consider the story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 23). The two disciples are walking along, sharing their broken hearts and despair with one another over Jesus’ crucifixion and the impending demise of everything they had poured themselves into. They were the death of hope embodied, the death of the Kingdom walking along. They were a moving wave of despair. If ever there was a mission in that moment, they were it. And Jesus, whom they did not recognize, catches up to them and walks up along side of them. He matches their speed. To be walking “with” someone, we have to be walking at their speed. It’s definitional. In other words, Jesus paddles into their wave of despair. Jesus matches not only their pace of walking, but he also paddles into their emotions. Matching a person’s emotion, or “speed”, is also called “compassion”. It is knowing by feeling. Jesus compassionately listens to the waves of emotion that these two hurting souls are feeling, and enters their conversation at their speed. There is an exchange, a question and an answer – Jesus is judging the distance and speed. The wave of emotion crests in an angry, incredulous outburst – “How can you not know what has happened here?!?!” Instead of fighting the wave of anger, Jesus rides with it, opening Scripture to them in the very wounded places that they are moving in. He isn’t paddling out. He is paddling in. Jesus doesn’t demand that the two come to him. He comes right into their reality, riding what is going on in them. He isn’t rebutting their experience. He is adding a new perspective to the movements that are already taking place, and he is doing it at the speed that the two disciples are traveling. And Jesus doesn’t “pop up” until the critical moment that will come later in the story when he is revealed to them in the breaking of the bread at supper. How did Jesus know when to pop up? I don’t know, but I would hazard to guess that he knew from experience. He lived it enough to know simply from the living of it.

Living missionally means paddling into other people’s circumstances, cultures, and lives. If we don’t paddle hard to match their pace, then one of two things will happen. Either the Kingdom opportunity will simply pass underneath us and leave us right where we started, or it will send us end over end in the most dangerous way possible. Surfers don’t demand things of the waves. The waves are what they are. They don’t bend to our needs. We have to judge the distance and speed and paddle hard to match it. We have to do that in the mission, too. If the language and culture is “teenager” for example, then we have to paddle in with an open mind until we match the speed of their emotion and the speed of the Kingdom of God that is already at work in them. We have to catch the language and the folkways of teenagers in order to move at their speed. We have to ask ourselves the distance judging question: “What is going on here?” And we have to ask ourselves the speed question: “Where is the Kingdom working in this situation?” It’s as much feeling it as thinking it. It is as much right feeling as right thinking. “Accurate empathy” is the term for it that I learned somewhere along the way.

An Example of Getting Moving – We Never Have it all Figured Out

Missional living also means being willing to get moving. Something I have learned along the way is that is easier to steer a vehicle that is moving than it is to get it going from a dead stop. It is even easier to steer a vehicle one hundred and eighty degrees, to turn it completely around, than it is to start from a dead stop. I think it is a gravity/inertia thing. Our community no longer waits to have every duck in a row before we engage a mission. We have a feel for it now. We get in it, start moving missionally and make adjustments along the way. Let me give you an example. We had been looking for a way to engage the homeless population in the City of Milwaukee, and we are always looking for ways to plant new missional communities. The Holy Spirit put the idea of street ministry on the hearts of a couple of people in the community. They felt very strongly that we could be doing some innovative things with intentional community building among the homeless. The call did not seem to be one to change the world with a big program, just a process of one-to-one engagement and relationship building. We had no specifics.

The call was affirmed when we sent a mission team down to Galveston, TX after Hurricane Ike to do some relief and rebuilding work. That trip began when a wild Christ-follower named John L. had a deepening sense that God wanted him to go on a mission trip, but he didn’t know where. The “where” emerged around dinner at his house when he shared his vision with the group gathered there sharing a meal. We had no team and no money, but within a week or two, we had a team, funding, and transportation. We just started moving, and the resources came to us. The presence of those resources is affirmation of calling to us. If resources don’t happen, we assume that what we were about to do is not something God wants us to do yet or at all. In this case, we got the resources. At the time that the call to go to Galveston emerged, no one had yet made the connection to the burgeoning sense of calling to do something locally. It’s funny how God works. The City of Galveston government assigned our little team to work for a week with an inner-city ministry group that did street ministry to the most marginalized members of Galveston society. They had planted themselves in some really ratty buildings in the worst part of the city, and had relocated in order to live there where they ministered. And they ran a street ministry. Where before we did not have a mental model of what a street ministry might look like, God took our team and immersed them in a ministry just like what we felt called to do. We helped them muck out and repair their damaged facilities, and they taught us how to do street ministry. We were both the object and the subject of mission in the same moment. So the team came back with a story to tell, and a model to teach, and we were off and running.

Now let me be clear about what “off and running” looked like. A fabulous Christ-follower named Chris J. had been feeling the birth pangs of a new mission building up inside of her for some time. It had no real shape, just a sense of spiritual anxiety and urgency. She thought it might be connected to the feeling in the community that we should be engaging the homeless. She had gathered about six people including myself around the truth of what was going on inside of her. Those six people were really committed to getting something started. We had no money to work with. And we didn’t really understand how the homeless migrate and live in the City of Milwaukee. We began a process of intentional prayer beginning with praying in and around the neighborhood where our food pantry was located. The Galveston ministry leader even came up and prayed through the neighborhood with us the first day. He was surfing our break that day. We prayed over every house and alley. And we walked a few miles in every direction around the pantry. Chris felt that she had had a vision for a place to start, so we put together some meal bags like the ones the Galveston ministry uses, and we set out for the park that had come to Chris in a dream. Did you hear that? The place to start came to Chris in a dream. That kind of thing is related in the Bible more times than I can count. And if it happened then, why wouldn’t it go down that way now? Why have so many church people stopped believing that the Holy Spirit is currently alive in the same way that the Holy Spirit was alive in the Bible? Chris believes, and so do all of the people she gathered around her. A point of note here is that Chris, who was once the object of mission, was now living and leading apostolically, led by Scripture and the Holy Spirit alive and at work in her. That is how multiplication works in our community – object to subject of mission, mission to friendship, friendship to discipleship, discipleship to leadership, leadership to apostleship.

When we arrived at the park we found that that neighborhood had been gentrified and that there were no homeless people living there. Chris was sure that her vision was to reach the homeless. Now, ten years ago, we would have chalked this up as a failure, packed up our vehicles and just quit. We would have belittled the vision as the remnant of a taco eaten too soon before bed. We have learned better now. Experience has taught us the feel of the rising wave overtaking our paddling. So we decided to do a walk. We prayed for a direction to walk in, and felt called to head north, so we did. Along the way, we passed a man with a couple of bags sitting in a doorway. We had the mistaken idea that we were being called up to the bridge over-passes that were up ahead where we had seen sleeping bags a week before. We walked right by the guy in the doorway except that I made eye-contact with him and I remembered thinking that there was something almost haunting about him. When we got to the over-passes, we found no one there. Again, that might have been enough to make us quit ten years ago. But now we were on a “God-walk”, led by the Spirit. Experience had taught us what it feels like to catch a wave. It came to two of us that the man we passed had a couple of plastic bags with him, and his shoes did not match the rest of his attire. Don’t confuse what I am about to say with stereotyping. I assure you it is not. But those are some visual characteristics of people who live on the street. In that moment, we all realized that that was a man we were supposed to talk to.

We walked back to that doorway, and engaged the man in conversation. It was, in fact, our first street ministry encounter. We learned that the man was homeless. We also learned that he was hungry. We hooked him up with a couple of bags of food. And we asked him where the homeless population hung out at this hour of the day. He told us that if we took him to McDonald’s, he would show us where to go. So we put him in our van and took him to the “Golden Arches” and got him a hot meal. He then informed us that if we proceeded up that same street to the intersection that was just three blocks ahead, we would find a strip mall parking lot. He told us to go there, and just open up our vehicles, people would begin to show up. So, we did that. And he was right. The corner was a bus hub that the homeless frequented at that time of day. We prayed over the spot and asked God’s blessing on what we were about to do, and before we knew it, we were handing out meals, meeting all kinds of people, and praying for anyone who asked for prayers. Because we believe that the movement from object to subject of the mission is the most important conversion in a life of conversions, we invited everyone we served or prayed with to hang out and help us hand out bags and pray for others. Many did. Within just a couple of weeks, it was common to pray for a hundred people or more. And it was common to have conversions every time we went out there. Those who had a conversion were immediately engaging others with an invitation to participate with us in the Kingdom of God on that corner. We developed a community of regulars who came out to serve with us. We have become friends. We open up the ministry now with prayer and a brief scripture study, and then we go out into the neighborhood with a meal to offer and a mission of prayer. Wow. Scripture, accountable friendships, prayer, mission…sounds like a church to me.

Remember that I said that when we started we had no money. These meals cost money – about $6,000 a year. We started buying them out of our own pockets, but quickly realized that we were feeding so many people that we couldn’t sustain that. So we put the word out through e-mails and through our virtual on-line communities such as those developed through Facebook, and we began immediately to receive donations from all over the world. We have received enough donations or food, clothing, blankets, and funds to continue this mission right up to now. And those who give also pray for the people that we pray for – we post their first names and concerns on Facebook so that anyone who wants to participate in the mission can. Thousands now pray. Had we waited to have cash in hand, we never would have gotten started. People connect their hearts to missions that are bearing fruit. We were bearing fruit before we ever went looking for donations. The truth of the matter is that this mission is a prayer ministry, and we could have done that without food or clothing to give to people. But inviting others to give to the mission, allows them to participate in the Kingdom of God. And so fruit is borne in two directions at once, and it is borne among people who have never met in person. They only know each other through on-line connections. We got moving, and then figured it out and made adjustments, and that has made all the difference. The street mission is constantly changing. Every week it is different, and since we started, we have changed locations several times. We did not have it all figured out when we started, we don’t have it all figure out now, and we will probably never have it all figured out. If we had waited to have it figured out, the wave of the Kingdom of God would have passed right underneath us, and we would still be sitting on our boards right where we were. We had six people, no money, and a vision not yet figured out. Apparently that was enough. It is now the norm.

Mismatching

As I said, in order to catch a wave, we have to match its speed before we pop up. If we mismatch the wave we will know pretty quickly because, in the example of mission to teenagers, either the teenagers will roll their eyes and pass us by, or they will respond vehemently and maybe even violently against us. When dealing with young gangsters or gang wannabe’s, that kind of miss can be as dangerous as it gets. I mismatched once out on the street in front of our food pantry, and said the wrong thing to a couple of gangsters who couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen, and both of them turned towards me while reaching into their waistbands up under their hoodies. On the streets here, the most unpredictable killers are under eighteen. Fortunately, I had enough experience to know to pull out of that wave and I beat feet back into the food pantry and locked the doors. I missed that wave and it nearly got me shot. I have learned a lot from that missed opportunity, and have become a better surfer because of it. As they used to say in skydiving, “Any landing you walk away from is a good one.” Or, as they say in surfing, “Whoa. Dude.” They mean essentially the same thing. By the way, with that lesson learned, I was paddling back out in front the food pantry the next Saturday. I have caught a few beautiful rides there since then. We have a couple of gangsters who now help us give food out, and participate in the Kingdom in doing so. The scarier the wave, the wilder the ride. We don’t do “crazy” for the sake of “crazy”. But Jesus came to seek and to save the lost (Luke 19:10), and that’s what we’re trying to do too.

Popping up: Total Commitment

In catching a wave, I will tell you right now that there is a point of no return. If you have paddled in to the point where you can feel the wave begin to carry you, you are going to go screaming down the face of that wave one way or another. The only question is, “How?” Once you’re up, you don’t get to pick the conditions. It might be like glass on the face of that wave. Or it might be all chop and bad wind. You just have to deal with the conditions because if you don’t, there’s going to be a big wreck and a lot of scrapes and bruises at the bottom. It’s true on a personal level, and it’s true on the community level, too.

Communities move on the energy of individuals. Communities get behind people. Almost all mission opportunities begin with a vision for a mission in an individual. But mission isn’t mission if it doesn’t involve at least two people. Individual acts of service are awesome and they are treasure in heaven, and the world would be a much better place if we all regularly engaged in them. But they are not the mission. The mission always involves a subject and object giving and receiving, and so it always involves more than one person. Paddling into the mission means tapping into your networks and into the hope and energy of your community. It might be the “brain” or the “ear” of the community that gets the community up on the board, but the whole body is going to ride it and the whole body is going to pay the price for a bad wipe-out. Yes, paddling into a mission opportunity means investing yourself, but people who don’t realize their connection to the hope and energy of the community they have invited to join with them are dangerous people in a community. Jesus told us that people like this are a reality and a part of the mission when he told us that some seed falls on rocky soil (Matthew 13:5). Mature communities of faith know that if they send people out into mission right away and disciple them along the way, from time to time they will find that the seed has been planted in soil that has no depth of character, and when that seed blows away it has the potential to do damage to the community. Mature communities send people out right away anyway. If we wait to see what kind of soil we are dealing with before we send any workers out into the harvest (Luke 10:2), then we will never send anyone out into the harvest. We just have to learn to deal with the reality and accept it as part of the mission.

People who don’t understand their connection in mission to the body, whose soil or character has no depth, are like a brain that wants to do its own thing without considering the impact on the body as whole. They are like the mind of an addict who loves the high and doesn’t care about the toll, because the toll is paid by the body more than the mind. The mind of an addict just keeps on writing checks that the body can’t cash. Dangerous stuff. Once you have gathered a community behind something, that something is no longer just your idea. It is a movement. And that movement is no longer simply yours. It never really was yours. It is Christ’s. It belongs to the Holy Spirit. And the body that Christ has gathered with you in your idea through your inspired invitations is going to pay the price right along with you. Mature communities of faith know this from experience and are less likely to have the wind knocked out them when the wind blows the seed away and the shallow believer quits or falls away. Immature communities put their hope in these new converts, and run a terrible risk of having their hope collapse when some of these new believers fall away. A community’s only hope is the Holy Spirit. Mature communities know that the only hero in any of these stories is God, not any one person.

As with the absence of human heroes in the mission, mature faith communities know that the only hero in Scripture is God. Any human “hero” that you can name in Scripture turns out to be pretty flawed upon close examination. Abraham is the covenant father, but I doubt that Hagar would see him as the hero of Scripture. King David is a man after God’s own heart, but I doubt that Uriah would consider him the hero of Scripture. If it was true in Scripture, it must also be true now. Mature communities invest in the development of disciples knowing that some will bear good fruit and some will fall away. They do not idolize people, though they may admire the work they do. They realize that all good work comes from God alone, and so what they admire is the work of God in and through individuals. They have learned from painful experience not to idolize people and place their hope in them. We have to be willing to risk failure when we get behind people. We have to be willing to take risks. And we have to be willing to fail if we ever hope to succeed. But be careful where we place our hope. God is the only one worthy of that investment.

Know this. Never forget this. Love and responsibility are the same word. Irresponsible people kill immature communities even though they might be saying that they are motivated by love. Irresponsible people who gather momentum and then fail to follow through on the commitment they have started have the potential to suck the hope right out of an immature body and injure it terribly. Integrity – being solid enough to count on, and staying connected and focused – is the key characteristic of a missional leader. It’s not that they don’t fail sometimes. It’s that they don’t quit when what’s at stake is more important than they are. Having the courage to commit totally and to stick with that commitment in the face of fear and personal loss is the only kind of missional leadership. Anything else is just addictive behavior and is destructive to the Kingdom of God. Mature communities are aware of the signs of this behavior because they have all seen this behavior and its impact at some point in their journey and have somehow lived through it and learned from it.

The Skill Set

Once you’re up, what you knew doesn’t matter. Things happen too fast to really think long and hard. You make adjustments. That’s the skill. It’s not what you knew going in –what you carried around in your head. It’s how well and how quickly you can figure things out and adjust to them. It’s not how well you can regurgitate what you learned in some rote format that you memorized. It’s how well you can adapt what you know to an ever-changing mission field, and connect what you know to what you need to learn to navigate the immediate situation. The skill set of mission is no longer simply “knowing”. The skill set is “learning”. Can your mind and heart expand to fit knew understanding and new dynamics that none of us control? I think that’s what’s behind the metaphor of new wine skins that Jesus uses (Luke 5:37). If our minds are rigid, when the need for new knowledge comes along, we burst at the seams instead of being able to expand what we think to a new situation. The Kingdom of God is constantly expanding, and our ability to learn must constantly expand along with it.

A Final Point on Commitment

Jesus tells his disciples to “consider the cost” before he sends them out. Jesus knows that surfing has a point of no return. Jesus knows that to follow him requires total commitment. There is no half-way once you’re out in the mission. And it can cost you everything. Surfing has its martyrs. Some of the best surfers have paid for their art with their lives. The mission has its martyrs, too. Remember Paul and Andrew and Stephen, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.? Once you’re in it, you’re in it. There’s no going back. Once you see that the Emperor has no clothes, there’s no going back to old ways and pretending he’s not naked. Once the enemy knows your name, you’re in it whether you want to be in it anymore or not. Consider the cost. Once your eyes are opened to the reality of the Kingdom of God in our midst, there is no turning back.

By Max Ramsey (Copyright 2-1-10)

The Surfer, the Sea, and Missional Transformation in the Small Church Environment: Chapter Three

{ March 8, 2012 @ 10:37 pm } · { Footsteps }
{ Tags: authentic, chaplain, childhood, Christ, church, cross, death, denomination, disciple, discipleship, emergent, essence, faith, family, God, grief, heaven, homelessness, hope, it is what it is, Jesus, journey, Kingdom, life, loss, love, metaphor, mission, missional, paddling out, parables, patience, peace, planting, poetry, prayer, religion, sobriety, social, spiritual, spirituality, storms, story, street ministry, surf, Surfing, the parable of the sea, the sea, transformation, truth, waves, wisdom, youth } · { Leave a Comment }

I first posted this two years ago. Again, it might be helpful to folks you are just kind of trying to figure out what this whole missional journey is. And then again…it might not be. Whatever. It’s free.

Chapter III – Paddling Out is the Hardest Part

The Sea as a Life Metaphor

Learning to swim in the sea is a great metaphor for life in a fallen world. In order to surf, you better be a strong swimmer first. Right from the time that Adam and Eve were exiled from the Garden of Eden we learn that life will not be without problems. In fact, because Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 3) and refused to take responsibility for it, we humans have been born into separation from God’s Will. In Eden, our minds and hearts were directly connected to God’s Will, and so life was idyllic. There was nothing to learn, everything was handed to Adam and Eve. But with the Fall, the easy way of knowing was taken from us, and now life is a journey of learning and growing back into the knowledge of God’s Will for us. In Eden, there were no problems. Outside of Eden, problems come at us all the time, and spiritual growth comes from the discipline of facing those problems and learning to overcome them. Like the waves in the ocean, problems come in all sizes and shapes. If we aren’t prepared, the wave knocks us off our feet and leaves us scrambling to recover. We get water up our noses, and sand in our ears, and we learn to pay attention and to deal with the reality of waves. The next time a wave comes, we know to duck under it, dive through it, or paddle over it. And we know that to do any of those things we have to know that a wave will definitely be coming and we have to face into it. There are breaks between the waves where we can catch our breath and prepare for the next one, but the next one is surely coming.

Our first time in the ocean we may very wrongly think that there would only be one wave and that that’d be it. But before the day is over we realize that there is an endless supply of waves, one after another. It is the rhythm of the sea. Or we may superstitiously think that if we manage to get through one wave with perfect form that God in God’s providence will reward us with perpetually calm seas. Or we might offer up all forms of craziness to God in the hopes that if we please God the sea will go flat only when we paddle out. We can even pretend that waves don’t really exist and are just figments of the imagination, and turn our backs on the surf. But saying the sea is not the sea, doesn’t change the sea at all. We will find ourselves wiped out and going over the falls if we try to pretend that waves aren’t real and act on that misbelief. Waves are real. So are problems. Problems are part of the nature of life in a fallen world – they are the hard way of learning now that the easy ways of Eden are no longer available to us. If the purpose of this life is to learn to live with God forever in Heaven as the Bible indicates it is, then facing and overcoming problems is the means to that end. We learn to navigate through one breaking wave, and that kind of wave is no longer as frightening as it was the first time. And there is always another wave coming. Life is a series of problems to be faced into and overcome. There is grace in that we find time to catch our breath between the waves, but there is reality and consequence in that another wave is always coming; if not today, then certainly tomorrow.

The ocean has times of calm, and the ocean has raging storms. And the ocean has everything in between. On the East Coast, when there is an off-shore breeze, the surfing is perfect. The wind sculpts the waves into perfect surfable works of art with a consistent rhythm. The waves come in predictable sets. But when the wind shifts and comes from the Northeast with force behind it, the sea turns to chaos, nearly impossible to surf and very hard to even stay alive in. Life has Nor’easters. Life has times where problems seem to come from everywhere, some small and frequent and others giant. The first time you paddle into a Nor’easter, it is frightening. There is no rhythm to the sea in a storm, it is the Biblical chaos that was here before there was a “here”, before God breathed upon it and said, “Let there be Light!” (Genesis 1). It can swallow you up. It can carry you away. Waves come quickly and erratically, rather than in predictable sets. And yet, even in the midst of chaos and wind and rain, there is always both beauty and grace. There is always a chance to catch your breath if you know how to swim and don’t panic. You learn to work with the currents and tide, instead of constantly trying to fight them. You learn that no matter what, you never let yourself get separated from the board. The chaotic sea is a reminder that we are not in charge here, and that compared to the power of the One who controls even the wind and the waves, we are very small indeed. That understanding of our smallness and powerlessness produces within us a sense of awe and a respect for the sea’s terrible beauty. Storms are part of life. They remind us that we are not in charge and that we must use the wisdom that God has given us, and have faith to rely upon God’s grace and mercy. And, if you just stick it out, storms always end and calm always returns, and with the calm comes joy and gratitude and a greater understanding of God and God’s Will for us. The ocean is a great metaphor for life in a fallen world.

The Sea as a Metaphor for the Mission

Surfing is a great metaphor for following Jesus into the mission. In fact, even though Jesus never actually referred to himself as surfer, his experience on earth as related in Scripture would indicate that he deeply understood the nature of the sea. Let me give you an example that takes place after the disciples have participated in the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand, and immediately after Jesus explaining the Parable of the Sower to the disciples. Jesus intends to head across the Sea of Galilee to cast out demons in the Gentile region of Gerasenes (Luke 8:22-26). Jesus knows what he is going to do. Satan knows what Jesus is going to do. But the disciples are so amazed at Jesus’ miracles and so confused about his teachings about seeds and soil that they have forgotten about the realities of life in a fallen world. Jesus sends the disciples across the Sea in a boat. He sends them into the mission. Do not miss this point! Jesus sends the disciples into the mission.

Jesus has come to seek and to save the lost (Luke 19:10). And there is a lost soul possessed by demons and in need of Christ’s redemption living just across the water in the graveyard in Gerasenes. The disciples must cross the water in order to get to the one that Jesus seeks to reach. The only way is through. I think that the disciples get into the boat naively thinking that their crossing will be uncontested like so many people do. That will not be the case. As soon as they are away from shore, the wind rises up against them and their small boat, and the sea begins to rage. The mission for them has just gone from exciting to terrifying like it does for so many people. And like it is for so many people, the problem is in the disciples’ unrealistic expectations of what the mission will be like.

None of us should think for a second that if we go to plunder the Gates of Hades (Matthew 16:18) and steal souls away from Satan, that Satan is going to let that happen without a fight. Satan will put huge waves in our path and chaotic seas before us in an effort to either scare us so badly that we turn back, or he will make every effort to outright drown us. Jesus who is sleeping in the back of the boat knows that it is just the wind and that all seas are navigable by the grace of God and with the faith and wisdom that comes from experience. The disciples are panicked having thought that the mission would be easy and safe. Jesus opts to calm the sea, but Jesus also ribs them a little by saying, “Oh ye of little faith.” Had their faith been greater, they would have known that it is the One who commands the wind and the waves that sent them into the mission to begin with.

Paddling Out

I think that hardest thing for a community to overcome in its transformation to mission is paddling out into the sea, paddling out into the mission. And I think that what makes it so hard to overcome is that many churches have been conditioned with unrealistic expectations of what the mission is really like. We are conditioned by well-meaning people to believe that if we only follow Jesus then things will be easy for us. That’s just rubbish! When I first started surfing, I was pretty naïve about the power of the sea. I’ll never forget the first time I looked out into the surf off the coast of South Carolina, a surf that I had been swimming in since I could walk. I saw these little two foot and three foot waves and naively thought, “No problem!” I had seen these guys surfing down here for years and it didn’t look that hard. I had my little Lightning Bolt 6-footer across my body in front of me as I waded out. The first wave broke just as it hit my board which then hit me. The physics of such things is something that I should have studied harder in school. Wham! The force of that little wave spread out over all six feet of that board and that board came up and hit me in the chin like a truck. The water in that six-foot section of that little wave probably weighed a couple thousand pounds and that wave was probably traveling at fifteen to twenty miles per hour. You get the idea. It split my chin wide open, and the only thing that kept me from blacking out was the thought that I was bleeding for sure and blood in the water attracts sharks. This was the summer after the movie “Jaws” had come out, and the abject terror that went through my body at the thought of bleeding into the ocean had me running out of the water at a sprint with my now-dinged board still strapped to my ankle. That must have been quite a sight! The best part of all of it was that the guy who had invited me to come surfing with him was now rolling on the beach laughing at me, and the sight of the whole thing had drawn the attention of every cute girl on the beach that I had hoped would notice my new-found surfer-cool. So much for cool. Dude, it was ugly!

My friend helped to clean me up with a couple of butterfly bandages from the lifeguard stand, and he showed me how to at least get past the first breaking wave without getting killed outright. Sympathy came only in the form a knowing look and a pat on the back. No coddling, just an invitation to get back out there. His reaction to my misfortune told me that getting your face bashed in is just a normal part of the process. Later on that day, I noticed that my friend had several scars on his face about the same size as the cut on my chin. No victims out here. Occasionally, stitches are part of the gig. Surfers surf. It’s what they do. More importantly, it’s what they are.

And then came the hard part. Once I got into deep enough water that I couldn’t stand up, I had to paddle against the surf. You stroke really hard between the waves because even when you duck-dive under the wave correctly, every wave pushes you backwards. Paddle hard, pushed back. Paddle hard, pushed back. Paddle hard, pushed back. Do that for a couple of hundred yards and see how tired you are. And all that work’s just to earn the opportunity to catch one wave one time. That’s just the way it is. There is no other way. It is what surfing is. It is an amazingly exhausting process to simply get off the beach and out into the line-up before you’ve even had a chance to get up on your board and catch a wave. Of course, once you accept the reality that that is what surfing is, and you have done it a couple of hundred times, it gets easier. Before long, in the midst of what was once torture, you find a rhythm and a peace in paddling out. And you get in some seriously good shape.

What if I had quit because my chin hurt? What if I had quit because surfing sometimes means getting bruised and cut and scraped? I would never have found the joy of the pure moment. I would never have even found the rhythm and peace that comes with simply paddling out. And what if I had quit because paddling out meant three steps forward and one step back? Or two steps back? What if I had decided that a successful paddle out meant that it was an easy cruise on a flat sea? If I had quit because the going was hard and very much contested by the very waves I intended to ride, then I never would have seen the seen the Kingdom come to life in that one pure moment, that one perfect ride. And, for the record, that one perfect ride didn’t come for a year. That’s an awful lot of effort for one pure moment. And it was worth every second of it. It’s what surfers do. Surfers surf. And surfing means paddling out.

Once a community decides it’s time to follow Christ into the mission, every move it makes towards the Gates of Hades will very much be contested. You may not know where you’re going, but Jesus knows where you’re headed because Jesus is the one who sent you out into the sea to begin with. And Satan may not know exactly where you’re going, but he certainly knows why you’re going and who sent you. Once you decide that you are called to tie Satan up (Matthew 12:29) and steal people away from him, every move you make from that point forward will be pounded by waves and heartily contested by chaotic winds. Satan is not threatened by awesome worship services that feed believers. He has already counted them as lost to God anyway. Satan benefits from people who already number themselves among the saved locking themselves away from the world to sing some cool tunes and get “challenged to think” by an interesting sermon, and then calling that the totality of faith and practice. On the other hand, Satan is very threatened by people with the courage and commitment and maturity of faith to venture out into the sea to rescue lost souls and lost people. If your community begins to take seriously the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19) in the mission field right outside its doors, your community is going to have everything including the kitchen sink put in your path to keep you from doing what Christ himself sent you to do. Your community is going to experience every kind of spiritual conflict and craziness that Satan can throw at it. If you don’t believe me, try it and see what I mean. You will be paddling out into big surf and rough seas. Even small waves if mishandled can cause you serious damage. And if you are serious about the mission, you won’t just be facing small waves. You will, from time to time, be facing monsters!

Everybody gets dinged up. It’s just the mission. There is no other way. It is what the mission is. You may not literally get your chin split open, but you will have your heart broken more than once. And you will feel the pain of betrayal and the hurt of harsh words spoken against you. You will have your character attacked, and that hurts when it happens. You will have your hopes crash down around you at least once. You will be bruised. You will find yourself going forward three steps and falling back one or two. Paddle hard, pushed back. That’s just the way it is. So many times in churches we have been conditioned to think that if we meet resistance there is something wrong with what we’re doing. If we run headlong into a giant wave, we are conditioned to think that we should stop because what we’re doing is too dangerous. That’s rubbish! Resistance is often evidence that you are on the right track. Surfing is dangerous. There is no other kind of surfing. Mission is dangerous. There is no other kind of mission. Your mission threatens a power stronger than you. But it is not stronger than God, and if you will just have the faith to stick it out even when it’s three feet forward and two feet back and your chin is busted wide open, then you may one day have the opportunity to walk on water with Jesus across the face of raging resistance, snatching people out of the clutches of Satan’s own hands, in one pure true moment as the Kingdom of Heaven comes to earth right before your eyes.

You will get hurt. You will get bruised. The mission will wear you out. It’s really hard to see progress and it often feels like you’re going backwards more than you’re going forwards. If you’re bleeding and tired and looking for sympathy, and you look into the eyes of the people who live the missional lifestyle every day, you will get sympathy only in the form of a knowing glance and a pat on the back…and an invitation to get back in there and try it again. If you look closely at them, they have many scars about the same size as your wounds. There is no other mission. There is no other way to surf. They are what they are. But if you want to be a surfer, surfers surf. And if you want to follow Christ, Christ-followers follow Christ into the mission. Paddling out is part of surfing. Paddling out is the hardest part.

Max Ramsey (Copyright 2-1-10)

The Surfer, the Sea, and Missional Transformation in the Small Church Environment: Chapter Two

{ March 7, 2012 @ 2:53 pm } · { Footsteps }
{ Tags: authentic, beach parties, chaplain, childhood, Christ, church, cross, death, denomination, disciple, discipleship, emergent, essence, faith, God, grief, heaven, homelessness, hope, hope for small churches, Jesus, journey, Kingdom, life, loss, love, mission, missional, organizational, patience, peace, planting, play, prayer, religion, small church, sobriety, social, spiritual, spirituality, story, street ministry, surf, Surfing, the parable of surfing, the parable of the sea, transformation, truth, vibe, wisdom, worship, worship in the missional community, youth } · { Leave a Comment }

I posted this two years ago. It might be helpful to folks who are trying to figure out this whole missional thing. One of the most important things I’ve learned over the past twelve years is that nothing is an exact fit in any two faith communities except hope. Hope fits everywhere. So if there’s something here you can use, use it. If not, our thoughts and prayers are with you in the journey.

Chapter II – Beach Parties

Man, I love a beach party as much as anyone else. There’s nothing better than chilling with friends after a day of surfing. Awesome stuff. There is absolutely nothing wrong with roasting a pig and kicking back and sharing stories with fellow surfers. The problem only arises when we want to wear the label of “surfer”, when we wear the right rash guard and carry a nice board, but we skip the surf and only go to the parties. We might look like a surfer, but going to the parties and wearing the right stuff doesn’t make you a surfer. It might even make you a Barnie. Surfers know the difference. Usually, everybody can tell the difference, and we’re only really fooling ourselves.

Don’t get me wrong here. Surfers LOVE to party! They even have their own brand of music, and it’s probably not what you think it might be. Here’s the thing: surfers surf. It’s definitional. And the party is a celebration of the fact they have seen the pure moment and lived to tell the tale. It is the place where stories are shared, truths are debated, methods explored, and lessons are taught and learned. And the party is the place where the dings and wounds from bad wipeouts are honored and healed. The beach party isn’t the point – it isn’t what makes a surfer a surfer. The beach party celebrates the week’s surfing; it doesn’t replace the week’s surfing.

Worship in the missional environment is not limited to what happens on Sunday morning. Worship is the totality of the offering. It is the totality of what is offered up with our lives throughout the week. I don’t speak for all of the movement of Christ, but for me, Sunday morning is the Beach Party! It is the time to celebrate the experience of mission. It is the gathering of people who spend the week in the mission to celebrate what we have seen and experienced, and to thank the author of that experience for the opportunity to participate in the mission and to have survived another week of it. It is the chance to give God the glory for the waves of mission that God has set before us. It is the chance to lick the wounds of too many wipe-outs to name, and to find the encouragement from other missional people to get back out there and try it again. Yes, we have our own brand of music, and it probably isn’t what most people think it is. And yes, we love to party. But the party isn’t the point. The mission is the point. Following Christ every day is the point. It is what makes a Christ-follower a Christ-follower. It is definitional.

All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” is a very applicable adage in the world of surfing. Play is necessary. In an important way, the work is play. It’s fun. It’s dangerous fun, but it’s fun. Surfing is physically and mentally demanding. It makes you tired. Rest and relaxation are crucial to keeping an edge, and are crucial to keeping a balance.

Surfing isn’t just an activity. It is a lifestyle. There is a rhythm to it, a pace.

If all we do is surf and we never get out of the water to celebrate and to heal, then we burn out, lose the edge, and eventually quit because we just have nothing left to put into it. Exactly the same thing can be said about the mission. Yeah, it’s awesome and it’s fun. But it also makes us tired. Play is necessary. It lets us recharge the batteries. It allows us a moment to reflect and learn from our mistakes. It lets us process what we did right and what we did wrong so that we get better and better every time we paddle out. The beach party lets us sit down with fellow surfers and gurus and learn from them, and lets them learn from us. Surfers are always both teachers and practitioners – gurus also surf, and also learn from others. The same is true for Christ-followers. Learning is almost always communal, or at least partly communal. And all teachers are also learners and practitioners. Why take the scrapes when we can learn from someone who already has them and can tell us how to avoid getting them ourselves?

I’m not sure whether or not this point fits here, but I’m a little sketchy anyway, so I’m going to just put it here. I don’t put on a suit and tie to go to a beach party after a day of surfing. First of all, I spent all my money on a surfboard and gas to get to the beach, so I don’t have a bunch of money left to spend on a suit. And the last thing I want to do when I go somewhere to unwind, to learn, to celebrate, and to heal is get all dressed up and have to worry about what I look like. I don’t even comb my hair. I don’t do “hassle” on my downtime. I either wear what I was wearing at the beach anyway, except maybe throw on a T-shirt and some flip-flops so I can get into a store or a restaurant, or I throw on some comfortable jeans and hoodie so I don’t freeze in the night air.

Worship in the missional environment shouldn’t require Christ-followers to put on a suit or dress, unless the Christ-follower feels called to do that for some reason that comes out of their own sense of self. First of all, they’ve spent all their money on food for the food pantry or clothing for the homeless. They don’t have a bunch of money to put into a suit or a dress that they wear for an hour and a half once a week. T-shirts and flip-flops should be good enough. If it’s good enough to get you into a store or a restaurant, then it should be good enough to get you into a worship service. If you just got finished painting a house for a senior citizen, then you ought to be able to walk into church wearing the jeans and the Carhart that you wore in the mission. Christ-followers don’t need any more “hassle” than the mission itself already puts in their path. They’re tired and spiritually hungry, and the last thing they want or need is to do anything that makes them more tired or hungry. If the party’s a hassle, then it’s not a party. It’s a hassle.

Too Much Time Planning Means Too Little Time Surfing

I know that some people naturally have the gift of hospitality. Others have the gift and skills of organization, and they should be allowed to use them. But planning a beach party can get out of hand if we try to control every element of it. The best beach parties are throw-togethers where everybody brings something to pass around, and everybody contributes something. Sometimes it comes together as though every detail was labored over, and sometimes it comes together as a hodge-podge. The partiers provide the music. They either pull out their ipods and hook them up to speakers, or they play it themselves on whatever instruments are available – an old uke or garbage can lid will do just fine. I have even heard Wagner and Bach off somebody’s then CD player at a huge party once, and it was amazing. But everybody comes with an open mind, because surfers are naturally open-minded. Surfing makes them that way.

If we tie everybody up making arrangements for every detail of the beach party, then nobody has time to surf. It’s cool to do a big shin dig with a lot of organization every once in awhile, but surfers surf. It’s definitional. If surfers have all the time in the world on their hands, then they might have time to surf and plan the party. But if a surfer has to surf or plan, the surfer will choose to use their time in the water. It’s just the way it is…or more correctly, it’s just the way they are.

I think that the same things can be said about Sunday morning worship services that can be said about beach parties when it comes to tying up too much time with making arrangements. Most working people only have about four hours per week to devote to the living out of their faith in focused ways. If we say that a worship service is about an hour long, then that’s already an hour that can’t be spent in the mission. If we spend three more hours taking care of every detail of the worship service, what time is left for the mission? What time is left for following Christ into the mission that God has called us into? Christ-followers follow Christ. It’s just the way they are.

I am not saying that we shouldn’t put some thought into our worship services. For some Christ-followers, that’s precisely where their gifts and interest lie. I am simply saying that time is limited, and if a Christ-follower has to choose between organizing a worship service and feeding the hungry or caring for the orphan and planning a worship service, they will usually choose following Christ into the mission. Christ-followers follow Christ. It’s definitional.

Surfing costs money. Parties cost money. If a surfer has to choose between fixing a board so he can surf the next day and buying new curtains for the beach house so it looks nicer for the party, the surfer will fix the board. Surfers surf. It’s definitional. Most surfers don’t even notice whether there are curtains in the window of the beach house anyway. Their minds and hearts are on surfing. It’s not that surfer’s don’t appreciate a sweet place to party and kick back. It’s just that it isn’t at the top of their agenda. Surfing is. We can party on the beach. It’s free. In fact, because it’s on the beach, a lot people show up who wouldn’t otherwise have because they simply walk right into the party. All we have to do is make sure we clean up our trash.

Intricate and elaborate worship services cost money, too. Small churches don’t have a lot of money. If they are really doing things right, every penny they have has to bear fruit for the Kingdom. Mission costs money, too. Following Christ means giving of our treasure to help those in need and to reach the lost for the Kingdom. If our funds are limited and we have to choose between spending limited dollars on the elements of elaborate worship spaces, sound systems, musical instruments, and ornamentation; and spending limited dollars on following Christ into the mission, Christ-followers will choose to follow Christ with their dollars. Christ-followers follow Christ. It’s definitional. We can worship in parking lot or a cornfield. In fact, because it’s right there in the midst of the mission field, a lot people show up who wouldn’t otherwise have because they simply walk right into the party. All we have to do is make sure we clean up our trash.

Sometimes the Best Party is Small. But a Big Party Now and Then Keeps You Rockin’

Who says every beach party has to be at the pavilion with a crowd of hundreds of people in order for it to be a good time? Some of the best beach parties I’ve ever been to were just a few close friends swapping stories and trying to understand the big picture huddled around a small fire roasting three-month-old marshmallows. Word. The intimacy means everyone connects to everyone on a really personal level. Maybe someone whips out a guitar and plays some cool tunes. Maybe somebody recites some poetry they read recently. We all talk about our wounds, our learnings, and the pure moments of truth and clarity. And we all walk away healed, refreshed, and reconnected.

But…every once in a while, it is awesome to cut loose in a stadium venue among thousands of people. If we had to create the venue every time we wanted the experience, forget it. It would never happen. So we just pile in the pick-up, buy some tickets, and go and rock in somebody else’s stadium. Doing that every once in awhile doesn’t mean we’re going to start surfing in somebody else’s break. It doesn’t mean we won’t be hanging out together anymore. It just means that every once in a while it’s cool to rock out somewhere that we couldn’t do for ourselves.

Worship in small churches is kind of like the campfire gig. It’s intimate. Everybody who comes can hear and be heard, and can contribute to the experience. We always get healed, energized, and reconnected. But small churches need to understand that sometimes it’s cool to shake it up, too. It’s okay to pack it all in the van, buy some tickets, and go rock in somebody else’s stadium together. You don’t always have to have the beach party at your house. Once in awhile it’s cool to let somebody else clean up the mess and let us just disappear into a sea of people in somebody else’s arena that you cannot, and do not need to, create. There’s nothing wrong with an “Away Game” once in awhile. Sometimes, the big gig is just what the doctor ordered and it’s just what will keep you rockin’ in the mission. And I am not saying that a Christian rock concert at Miller Park is everybody’s thing, either. Maybe your van load is headed for the cathedral to rock with the coolest choir on earth. No matter the sound or the stadium, road trips can feed your soul. It doesn’t mean that your members will stop coming to your church. It doesn’t mean that your fellow Christ-followers from your tribe will stop following Christ. It just means that every once in a while it’s cool to rock out somewhere that we couldn’t do, and don’t need to do, for ourselves.

I got into surfing because a surfer invited me to a beach party when I was about eleven or twelve. I had an amazing time at the party listening to the stories and just getting into the vibe of the people there. It was electric! And here’s the important thing: they didn’t invite me to come the next party. They invited me to come surfing with them the next day. So the next day I showed up at the beach, and we got in the water. The rest is history. But the point is that they invited me to participate in what they did, and it wasn’t partying. It was surfing. Sooner or later you have to leave the party, put the beach at your back, and paddle out. That’s what surfers do. Actually, it is what they are.

Max Ramsey (Copyright 2-1-10)

The Surfer, the Sea, and Missional Transformation in the Small Church Environment: Chapter One

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I first posted this a couple of years ago. There are several other chapters that can be found by going to the sidebar and selecting March 2010. Scroll down and you should find them…if you want to.

Chapter One – Surfboards

As a recovering surfer, I have found that there are many images of the ocean and its ways that are great metaphors for God, and life, and all things that matter. I grew up around the ocean and have spent more than my share of nights sent to sleep by the smell of the salt air and the sound of the surf gently lapping the shore. When I moved from the East Coast to Midwest, I found myself isolated from the spirituality of the waves, and I found my surfboard quiver exiled to the rafters of my garage. One Labor Day weekend, I got an invitation to spend a few days on the Chain of Lakes in Wisconsin, a series of small inter-connected lakes with no-wake restrictions and the shelter of woods all around them. The invitation said, “Bring your boat if you have one”. Well, I don’t have a boat exactly, but I looked up into the rafters of my garage and saw my Robert August 10-foot nose-rider covered in dust and garage yuck, and I thought it was time to get it down and get it wet again. My son got his board down too, and we cleaned them up and strapped them to the roof of the truck, just like old times, and headed off for the weekend.

Upon arriving, we got some strange looks. Our host sauntered over to my truck window with a well-meaning smirk on his face, and chuckling said, “We said boats, not surfboards. These lakes don’t have waves.” Without even thinking about it, I replied, “Hey, if this is the only boat you have, it’s the only boat you need.” And that moment of clarity has served as my mantra in small church missional transformation and ministry. I have become so tired of hearing the common wisdom that if you’re church isn’t over a thousand people, your church isn’t showing fruit of the Kingdom. “Only big churches are influencing the community that you live in.”, I heard at one conference I went to. Well, I’m here to tell you loud and clear, that if you are a small church, and a small church is what God has given you to work for His Kingdom with, then a small church is all you need. Our little surfboard of a Christ-crazy community of faith has done more hands-on mission and has drawn more disconnected people into the mission than most “churches” five and ten times its size. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard people in authority tell me that this little community will never make it. And yet, we are thriving. Being small means we deal with a unique set of hurdles to overcome, but we are definitely neck deep in the work of the Kingdom. If a surfboard is the only boat you have, it’s the only boat you need. God has given you what you need to do what God has prepared for you to do. So be encouraged, and know that God can do great things with the community of faith that you participate in if you only turn the reigns of that craft over to God and His Mission to steer you.

Surfers Don’t Wear Lifejackets

Boating and surfing are not the same. Surfers are in the hands of God and the ocean. Wearing a lifejacket will wreck your board, keep you from being able to respond quickly to the waves, and can even take your life by holding you up in the pounding surf. All you have in the raging sea is a leash that tethers your ankle to the board you are riding. Life jackets will kill you. If you can’t move freely with the water, at worst you will die, and best it will take the life out of surfing.

A lot of little churches I have seen, served, and worked with never quite grasp the idea that lifejackets may be exactly what is keeping them from becoming what they are best shaped to be and do – to surf. Lifejackets come in many forms, and the truth is that only your community can really discern with God’s Spirit whether or not they are clinging desperately to one, or have one stashed under the seat to grab if the sea rises up and they get scared. Even if we can’t name them all, there are a few lifejackets that I have found to be common in little churches that are dying and that can’t figure out why.

Too many little churches are strapped with endowments and they fall into the mindset that that endowment will be a life jacket in stormy weather. Surfers love stormy weather because stormy weather means big waves. And big waves and life jackets are a fatal combination. Whether a church has an endowment or not, isn’t really the issue, or the danger. The danger is in distorting what that endowment represents. If that endowment takes away the urgency that is so much a part of surfing, then that endowment is a threat to your being. I have seen people paddle out into the line-up and then sit there all day without ever catching a wave because they think there will always be another wave and they have all day. And then the wind dies down, and the sea goes flat, and the day is over. But spiritual surfers know the urgency of the moment. “Seek God while he can be found”, the Bible teaches. Surfers know that every wave is different, and all of them are once in a lifetime. They came to surf, not to sit. They didn’t paddle out to sit and talk. They came for the ride. They leave everything behind that gets in the way of the chance to catch one wave and ride it out. It’s all or nothing. It’s now or never.

Another lifejacket that we often find ourselves wearing thinking that it is the surfboard itself is tradition. When we are first learning to swim, we need a lifejacket. It takes away the threat of drowning and allows us to learn and develop a strong stroke. “That’s the way we’ve always done it” is the mantra of a lot of small churches that are just not managing to get off the beach and into the sea. And its opposite, “We’ve never done things that way before.” Those things can help us when we are first learning to swim, but there is a reason that Olympic swimmers don’t wear lifejackets – at some point they become counter-productive. The best surfers learn from the best surfers of the past and then innovate in order to move into a constantly changing sea. It isn’t that we don’t carry the lessons of the past within us, we just don’t strap them around our necks with the superstitious idea that our traditions will keep the sea from pounding us to death.

Likewise, I think that a lot of little churches keep thinking that they are big churches and structure themselves as though they are, thinking that the structure – the boards, the committees, the staff – will keep them afloat if things get rough. We can be surfers or we can be battleship captains, but we can’t be both and still be one or the other. If we put too much structure on top of a surfboard it will either sink, break up in the waves, or else we will simply run out of room for people on it. We lose the advantages that a surfboard gives us – maneuverability and the ability to dance on the sea. Surfboards need fins to steer, but too much fin is a drag and not a help. We need just enough fin to keep from being blown sideways or from tipping over. A better word than structure is “stability” – just enough to turn but not so much that it keeps us from catching a wave. When we begin to think that our complex organizational chart is what is keeping us from sinking, it has become a lifejacket that will get in the way of our ability to maneuver in the mission field.

The Parable of Surfing

Surfing is an edgy and dangerous gig because it’s just you and the board you’re tethered to in a sea you don’t control with the power to swallow you whole as if you never existed. So what is this metaphor? What is this parable for small church transformation to mission really about? Well, let’s start with the sea. What is the ocean we’re paddling out into? I think it is the mission field. It is the world into which we are called to bring the Good News, to participate in God’s emerging Kingdom. When I first re-embraced surfing as an adult, I quickly also re-embraced a healthy respect for the power of the ocean. Paddling into even a moderate surf is a daunting task for a novice. I have a vivid image of this metaphor as I was a young person driving away from the Outer Banks of North Carolina, chased away from Nags Head by a hurricane warning. The roads had not all been turned north yet, but most people with half a sense of what a hurricane can do to that thin strip of land had packed up, boarded up, and were on their way up to Virginia and higher ground. Most people. Except for a narrow stream of cars with surf boards strapped to their roofs headed down into the impending hurricane because they knew that the best waves are just out in front of the storm. These people had a very different paradigm for life than I did, than my dad did, and certainly than most of the sane world did. And yet, they did what they did, and they were what they were. They were surfers. They went where the waves were.

Everyone who follows Christ seriously also takes seriously that they are called into the mission field. Christ followers do what they do – they follow Christ. They are what they are. They are Christ-followers. The mission field for your community is right outside its doors, just off its shore, if you will. It is those places where the sea is and where God is at work bringing calm and order and God’s Kingdom. It might be a nursing home in need of community support. It might be a public housing complex. It might be a corporate boardroom. It might be a high school hallway. It might be a street corner where kids are killing each other over the right to deal drugs or the colors of their gang. It is the battleground where souls are won and lost for the Kingdom. It is all of those places where God’s presence is very much contested. And it is where Christ-followers do what they do and are what they are. A surfer without the sea is not a surfer. A Christ-follower not engaged in the mission on some level is not…well…living out the definition of following Christ. Indeed, they may even be distorting the definition.

Like the sea, the mission field has long periods of flat. And then it has days when it rages. It is unpredictable. It is dangerous. It has rhythms. It has heroes and it has martyrs. It cannot be fought, but rather it has to be understood so that we can work within it. It is bigger than we are. Only God controls it. And we are called into it. Some are called to go in huge crafts to carry out some purpose that that huge craft is designed for. And some of us wade into the surf on foot with just a surfboard under our arm and the Spirit of God within us. Gifted according to purpose, big churches and small churches are called and sent into the mission field.

Where does the board we’re tethered to fit into this emerging metaphor? Is the surfboard the church? Is it the building? Is it the community? Is it the Kingdom of God? Is the Holy Spirit? The only answer I can give with any integrity at all is that I’m still working to figure that out. It’s easier for me to tell you what it isn’t, than it is for me to tell you exactly what it is. Surfers are comfortable in ambiguity. The surfboard is definitely not your church building. The building for many people is just another lifejacket. It will give you the illusion of safety but if it is misunderstood in terms of value and utility, it can actually wreck your board and kill you. The building turns too slowly, it is too heavy, it is too much work to surf with. It isn’t that a surfer doesn’t appreciate a nice place to rest and recover, it’s just that if that place takes all of our time, then we become simply beach-hut maintenance people instead of surfers because there is no time left to be in the water. We surf. It’s what we do. It’s where our time goes. What we surf on has to be something we can easily carry, that we can maneuver quickly, and that does not drag us down when strapped to it. And people who actually surf have boards with dings on them. Ugly is good in surfing. It means that the board is actually exposed to the ocean frequently. A perfect board hasn’t seen much actual use. The building is definitely not the board.

But is the surfboard the community? Maybe. It’s part of it. I think, though, that the surfer is the community. It is the hands and the feet, the heart and the mind. The members of the community acting as one body are the surfer. Surfers are extremely well coordinated people. They are in tune with their bodies. Their body parts are all focused on a single purpose in a single moment, a moment of intense effort, momentary terror, total commitment, followed by unbelievable joy. A surfer’s survival depends on their ability to focus totally, as a single coordinated being, for short and frequent periods of time. I think small church communities are like that, too. We don’t have to be together on everything all the time. A lot of incredible surfers are actually a little bit flakey when they aren’t actually doing what they do – surfing. The intensity of the mission means that a totality of focus all of the time will cause us to burn ourselves out. Surfers are laid back, go with the flow, except in the crucial moment. And good surfers develop excellence in the skill of recognizing a crucial moment when they see it. Small churches that surf well are like that too. Their atmosphere is laid back, cool, accepting. But they recognize a crucial moment and come together with a coordination of purpose and focus when a wave of the mission crests and they have an opportunity to catch it. Short bursts of total focus and coordination, not total coordination all the time is a part of small church transformation to mission.

Small churches have unique challenges similar to a surfer’s challenges in that one bad choice can kill you. You have to be able to move quickly and to pull out of the wave if you’re in it on the wrong angle. Uncoordinated people spend a lot of time “going over the falls”, vomiting seawater. So even though the requirement for coordination and focus is short, the life of the small church depends on its ability to do that. It is a unity of purpose that allows it to happen, and learning the discipline of focus on purpose will be a huge part of the transformational journey. That is something we will cover in depth in a later chapter.

The surfboard. What then is the surfboard? I have come to think of the surfboard as the Holy Spirit. It is what I have tethered myself to. It is what our community has tethered itself to. It is what we seek to become one with. It is what keeps us up and it is that upon which we “walk on water”. Or rather, it is that upon which we fly across the surface of the water, one with its very currents. If we aren’t tethered to the right thing in this missional journey, big or small, we’ll never surf, and we’ll likely drown or never get in the water at all. The Spirit comes in many shapes and sizes, always appropriate for the wave we are destined to catch. Sometimes the Spirit is a shortboard, sometimes a longboard, sometimes even a hydrofoil we have to strap ourselves into to ride, but never too big or too heavy. Everything else can fall away and this community will still be together surfing because we are tethered to what is required to surf, and surfing is the point. The pure moment comes when the surfer and the board become one, flying across the face of a giant wave rising in the wake of the complete unity. The pure moment for a small church is when the body and the Holy Spirit become almost one in the service of the mission, reaching people, changing people, seeing new life rise up huge in the wake of that unity. A surfer is tethered to a surfboard. It’s definitional. A missional community is tethered to the Holy Spirit. It’s definitional.

So where does the Kingdom of God fit into this metaphor? Well, my friends, I have come to understand that the Kingdom of God is the ride. It is the perfect wave. It is the ride of a lifetime. One day, we will have the ride forever, but for now, we live for the pure moment, knowing that those moments are here sometimes if we are looking for them with passion and focus and purpose. For now, the ride always ends. The pure moment is a moment. And then it’s a paddle back out. But the moment makes all the wipeouts, all the board dings, all the times we’ve bounced off the coral worth it. That one ride, that one pure exhilarating ride makes the memory of all the effort and all the pain fade away. And the moment will come again if we have the discipline to paddle back out and the courage to overcome the terror of the crest and the total commitment to pop back up to catch the next one. This isn’t heaven, but there are heavenly moments.

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