Archive for year: 2020

Here’s ten times that I’d encourage a would-be church planter to slow down and think twice before stepping out to start a church. I wouldn’t necessarily say these are hard-and-fast rules, but they should at least be reasons to step back, bring in some outside wisdom, and tread with more care before jumping in. Being a pastor, after all, is an immense and serious calling; planting a church I believe is much more so, not less.

I would love more people to plant churches! I really would. But I would prefer these plants started well, were led responsibly, and lasted long.

Church planting is massively needed and should be encouraged. However, in the same way that having a child is not a decision to be taken lightly, so should we birth new communities with a great deal of care, support, and responsible thinking.

Here are ten times that I’d ask you to slow down and think more carefully.

Planting because you’re hurt

I too bear scars from poor experiences in churches. If, however, I responded to my hurt by trying to build my own hospital, something would probably be amiss.

Starting with the pastor, church is not designed as a way for the leaders to make themselves feel better, or as a way of ‘fixing it’ in others without waiting for true healing. Planting out of hurt will often shape all the ministry we do subversively to this end. What often results is building ourselves a yes-network of also-hurting people. This will leave a church isolated and separate from the wider Body of Christ, and view those ‘outside’ as aggressors and those within as victims. This might be a support group, but it’s not – on its own – a church.

Church should be a place for the wounded and the hurt, for sure – but I’m not convinced that fresh personal hurt is a sound enough reason to plant. In the same way, we shouldn’t have a baby to make us feel better, so too we should be careful with creating a new church because of hurt.

Planting in the middle of deconstructionism

Looking at deconstructionism in its original form (Derrida et al), we need to be understanding it as a process of exploration in order to find truth – you are supposed to reassemble the parts afterwards. We, however, have made an art of deconstruction as a perpetual state, where the pieces stay fractured. Our ‘question everything’ turns into ‘question, but don’t actually seek answers.’ This, I think, becomes lazy, and worse, can actually stop wounds from becoming scars.

Pastoring a church from within the middle of this is like running a racetrack, and each night dismantling all the cars and hiding all the fuel. When the drivers arrive each morning, they’ve got nothing left but a pile of parts, and are left alone to deal with it.

Although we should always seek to question and challenge, assuming deconstruction as our ultimate posture is not the right frame of being for someone who is seeking to be a shepherd of others.

Planting to prove something

Have you ever looked at a preacher or a pastor and thought ‘I could do that better than them’? Me too. It’s a big leap, however, from thinking that to actually doing it to prove it.

Planting a church to prove you’d make a good pastor, or to show other churches how it’s supposed to be done, makes the plant about you. Being a pastor, however, is essentially a selfless pursuit. A church is fundamentally there to serve people not your ego.

If you think there could be true calling inside your egotistical ‘I could do that better’ musings, then instead talk to a pastor and look at ways you could serve and find out with accountability what that calling might look like.

Planting because you weren’t hired

This one seems to be surprisingly common. Someone wasn’t chosen to be a pastor, but still has a burning desire to do so, and so they plant instead.

There might be some situation in which this is the right course of action, but my suspicion is mostly this would be a reactionary response to disappointment. If we don’t get a pastor position, then a period of reflection should follow. We should reflect on why we were not a good fit, and perhaps whether there are still things we need to learn before continuing.

Also, leading an established church and planting a new one, are totally different callings requiring different skills – so if you were seeking the first, I’m be cautious before assuming you’re equally equipped for the second.

Planting when you haven’t identified a mission area

Plants should exist because there is an area that another church isn’t currently doing healthy mission and ministry within. We plant where people are being missed and there are plenty of these places available.

This means that what should drive a plant are local needs, compassion for missing people, and a desire to bring the gospel where it is not currently spoken.

When churches are planted without this, what tends to happen is they just siphon people off from other churches. This can weaken the wider body of Christ by actively disrupting established communities. When these plants fail, which statistically seem to be after about nine months, these people are often left feeling they can’t go back, meaning they end up nowhere.

Planting when you’re not being mentored

Every pastor needs to be accountable to somebody. Every church planter needs the personal support and discipleship of somebody wiser and more experienced than they are. This can be provided locally, or by a national body, or even a good friend, but it is utterly essential for a healthy pastor of a sound plant. They must be asked the hard questions and challenged deeply and lovingly about their motives. I believe all pastors should welcome this before stepping out.

It’s too often the case that somebody retreats from church, isolates themselves from the community, doesn’t seek personal spiritual support, lives in their own head, resounds in their own echo chambers, and then – somehow, miraculously – discerns a sudden and divine calling to plant a church.

I think this is rarely how God works. He calls us to be subject to one another, and to thrive within accountable community.

Planting as a favour

This is a bit weird, but I’ve seen people plant because other people asked them to as a favour. It wasn’t necessarily that the planter felt a calling to lead a church, but that other people within churches wanted someone else to do a better job somewhere else than what they had. So rather than getting involved in serving, they subversively went around corners and behind backs to convince someone else to make somewhere more favourable for them.

The issue with this is similar to not identifying a mission area in that this doesn’t create a church plant so much as a church split.

Friends can encourage you and say they see pastoral gifts in you, but that shouldn’t come with conditions and baggage. It might be a nice ego stroke but instead encourage them (and model for them) getting involved more actively by serving within the community that exists.

Planting when you haven’t talked to other churches

There are true church plants that do the homework, research the area, communicate with the right people, and then start well so have a good chance of pastoring uniquely and with longevity. Then there are church plants that happen sneakily, subversively, often without the other local churches even knowing.

Unless every church in your area is actively preaching heresy or damaging the reputation of the Kingdom of God, then you really shouldn’t seek to plant without talking first with those who have been doing it.

If you’re planting a church then, like it or not, you’re becoming part of the wider Body of Christ. If you don’t seek to add to the health of the whole, then you’ll end up being something like a severed limb. You’ll do some things well (at least for a while) but you’ll be sadly missing out on others.

Planting when you can’t speak clearly on what a church is

What you might be discovering here is that I’m speaking out against half-baked and reactionary church plants that don’t really know what they are. I’m fine for people to plant a ministry, a home group, a support network, a charity, a missionary organisation, or any other kind of healthy group, but it means something very specific to plant a church.

I’m not suggesting that you necessarily need a theology degree or encyclopaedic understanding of ecclesiology, in the same way a parent doesn’t need to have read Piaget. But if you’re about to plan to have a baby, then if would help if you were fully invested in understanding what it was that you were getting into. If you thought that having a baby would be all cuddles and cuteness, then you’ll be pretty freaked out by what you’d get!

A church is not a home group, a support group, or me and my mates hanging out and singing songs. These might all be important parts of what a church could be, but this is far from the whole picture. Ask a Pastor who’s been doing it for a while what a church is and what’s truly involved.

A church is a living and active lifetime community that seeks to develop lasting and deep local expressions of mission, ministry, care, worship, prayer, sacraments, teaching, fellowship, and support for vulnerable people. It’s a mutual network of believers – real people with families, jobs, histories, and needs. There are tragedies, bereavements, conflicts, personal battles, and very real pastoral responsibilities. It’s not a small business marketed well for a few years, then closed when the customer base runs dry.

Starting a church is no less than starting a family, it’s important that we understand some of the weight of that before we jump in.

Planting when God didn’t tell you to

I believe church planters should still have to go through a process of assessing their calling as pastors. This process will take a little while and should involve a lot of people who ask objective and challenging questions about motives. It should include individual and community support periods of deep reflection. It should include long family conversations on how it will shape the entire direction of life for the foreseeable future.

In the bottom resonant part of your heart, you should feel the rumble of God saying, ‘I’m with you and I want you to step out and do this.’ Before you think of a mission area, a location, a style, a building, a team, or anything specific or physical, you should have felt the pull of God on your life to pastor. The calling should drive the plant, not the other way around.

Don’t just decide that God has told you to go without properly asking Him about it. If God tells you go – then go! But ask that question with all the right accountability, reflection, and with a sense of humble realism. Then, if He says go – go. And strap in!

All the best.

 

Enjoyed this? Check out ’57 Random Suggestions for New Pastors’

Photo by Skull Kat on Unsplash

One of the most essential things that we can do for a young person is help them take responsibility over their own faith. The problem, however, due in no small part to our hero complexes, is we can be more inclined to make our faith their faith.

Our job is not to conjure God up in the lives of young people, our job is to point them to God and then get out of the way. One of the only things we see the apostle Philip doing in the Gospels is just bringing people to Jesus. He then disappears from the narrative and Jesus takes over.

Eli, in the calling of Samuel (1 Sam. 3), saw where God was at work in the life of young Samuel, named it, gave Samuel some help to understand it, and then went back to bed – leaving Samuel and God to get on with it.

Sometimes I worry that our relentless pursuit for ‘relevancy’ means we make the gospel too palatable and faith too fickle. The result is young Christians whose faith becomes largely dependent on us and the projects we create for them. When we leave, or when they outgrow the projects, it’s all too common for young people to outgrow this dependant faith at the same time.

Some of the answer to this is found in integrating young people into the life of the church much sooner, helping them become active participants in the community of faith. I think, however, that in order to address this issue properly, we need to go deeper than this. We first need to address our attitudes towards young people.

Reactive youth ministry

I think our projects, our teaching, and our resources, (and even our job descriptions) are far too often reactive rather than proactive. Like all things reactive, they react out of fear. If we fear that young people aren’t coming to church, we might change things reactively to get them to come. If we fear that our young people might lose their faith, will teach them reactively in the hope of gaffer-taping our faith to them. If we fear they aren’t responding to God in worship, we might turn down the lights down or up the volume. If we fear they aren’t responding to our ‘altar calls’ we might chip away at the call until its broad enough that someone’ll stand up.

So, let’s ask the question honestly: Are we scared for our young people’s faith?

When young people don’t look like they’re responding in worship, or don’t put their hands up during a response time, how do you feel about it? Are you upset, afraid, desperate, embarrassed, guilty? Or are you, confident in the work God has given you to do, happy that these young people are able to make their own decisions about how, when, and if, this stuff becomes part of their lives.

Young people need to be given responsibility over their own faith. We’re there to facilitate that faith, introduce them to Jesus, and help them understand what that means, but it’s their job to maintain their own relationship with Him. We cannot do this for them.

Shifting the assumptions

A young person’s relationship with Jesus belongs to that young person. We can instruct, advise, point, and help shape, but we can’t live their relationships for them, or – even worse – try to create it for them. It’s the same with marriage. I can model a healthy relationship with my wife to a young couple, but our unique relationship cannot be the blueprint for theirs. If every time they make a relationship decision by referring to us, they won’t grow their own intimacy, communication habits, or even create their own formational memories.

So, what do you do that helps a young person relate to God for themselves? When a young person asks you a question about their life, for instance, have you ever responded with something like ‘what did God say when you asked Him?’ That is an important example of shifting responsibility. It’s not that you don’t answer, but you begin with clearly assuming and communicating that their relationship with God is the key.

So slow down! Making a life-defining decision to follow Jesus, and then live that out for the rest of our lives is no little thing. It’s not, contrary to popular opinion, something that can always be decided in the moment after three songs, an empathetic talk, and an altar call.

I’d rather a young person took ten years to work it out, had times away, and seasons of searching, and then stuck at it, rather than recommitting to God every year at camp, without ever really growing in maturity until they leave it all behind at age 18.

Let’s give young people the respect they need by allowing them the space for the responsibility required for a lifetime of faith.

It will also help us sleep sounder, last longer, and live better, knowing that God’s got this – our job is to point, love, encourage, and then get out of the way.

 

Photo by Dollar Gill on Unsplash

Let’s start with an exercise, which of the following statements do you associate with,

1) when you were a young person yourself,

2) when you first started youth work, or were taught youth work

3) what you teach today:

• ‘You can do anything you want to ’
• ‘You can be anything you want to ’
• ‘You need to discover who you truly are.’
• ‘God has a specific plan for your life.’
• ‘I accept you no matter what.’
• ‘Don’t let anyone tell you what you can/can’t do’
• ‘Don’t let anyone tell you what you can/can’t be’
• ‘Nobody deserves to be ’

Many of these are similar, but there are some interesting differences. When I was a young person, I remember everyone teaching me that God had a plan for my life which I simply needed to find out and walk in. When I began youth work myself, this changed subtly. I taught instead that you could achieve anything, so dream big because you can do anything you want to do. Post-market crash, and with the emergence of Gen Z, this changed again. Identity topics began to have more to do with discovering your ‘true self’, accepting it, and fighting for your right to it.

These three different perspectives have mostly been true in some form across the last few decades, but with different aspects dialled up or down.

The silver bullet

Identity is widely agreed in both Christian and secular youth work as one of the most important topics to cover. It can be the silver bullet to a young person’s ability to grow confidently and healthily. It’s essential, therefore, that we know what it is we’re talking about when we use the word ‘identity’. But do we?

I believe there is a lack of solidity under the ground of this, essential, topic of identity. This crumbly foundation has lead to inconsistency in our resources, and a lack of depth within our lifestyle teaching throughout Christian youth work.

So, here’s my question to youth workers: ‘Do you really know what you mean when you use the word “identity” with young people?’

Usually identity as a topic orbits the ideas of self-actualisation, self-esteem, relationships/community/belonging, love and acceptance, physical safety and security, and physiological needs. We could also explore personality types, gender, race, history, class, additional needs, community structure, education, aspirations, family backgrounds, experiences, and… well a whole lot more. For Christians, we’d add in being created by God, found in Christ, saved by Grace and empowered by the Holy Spirit within faith communities, etc. It’s a broad topic.

A solid foundation, I believe, would begin with the identity of Christ himself, balanced across our supra-cultural traits, then lived out in the world. Without this (or more often reversing this; so starting with your place in the world, then trying to figure out your humanity, then trying to shoe-horn Jesus in afterwards) creates all kinds of mutually-exclusive messages within our teaching.

A complex constant, or constantly complex?

The thing is, identity really is quite complex, and it’s certainly not static. For all of our preaching on ‘finding our true selves’ – as if that was a static treasure hidden inside a proverbial Kinder egg which simply needs unveiling and putting together – in reality our ‘true self’ is immensely fluid and fickle. It changes, legitimately, in different contexts and at different stages of life. So, what do we really mean?

It’s super important that we help to develop healthy, confident, resilient, personable, and able young people, but we do want to take care which assumptions we might be accidently propping up along the way – and how those assumptions will battle each other in the mind of a developing young person.

My contention is we should begin with the identity of Christ (himself, not us), then start working out what it means for us to be in Christ, then explore living out our lives about Christ.

I’ll spend more time on that in another post, but to help us for now define more clearly the extent of our uncertainty on the topic, here’s some abstract questions. My hope is through simply exploring these, and other questions like them, we’ll begin to think a little deeper, and we’ll hone and nuance our thinking about identity. This is a topic that’s worth the effort!

Some thought-experiment questions

1. Does ‘you can be anything you want to be’ mean ‘you can be a helicopter’?
2. Does ‘you can do anything you want to do’ mean you can fly?
3. If you identify as a cat, is it my duty to your health to treat you like one?
4. If you identify as indestructible, would it be inappropriate to stop you jumping off a tall building?
5. If you identify as invisible, and by looking at you I would deeply offend you, should I look at you?
6. If you identify as a nudist, should someone make you put on pants in Starbucks?
7. If you fall out with your family, can you consciously decide they are no longer related to you? Would you expect that to be recognised by others?
8. If you identify as being sick with the flu (without any symptoms or diagnosis) should the doctor write you a sick note so that you can stay off work/school?
9. If your identity produces a threat to others, can I intervene?
10. Is ‘personal identity’ or ‘group identity’ more important? Which should win when both are in tension?
11. What/who should be allowed a say over your identity?
12. When is rejecting behaviour the same as rejecting personhood or identity?
13. When is rejecting personal narrative the same as rejecting personhood or identity?
14. Does ‘discover your true self’ need additional help to grow that into a ‘better self’?
15. How malleable is identity?
16. How much do you expect your identity to change?
17. How is identity linked to maturity? How should one affect the other?
18. Is self-reporting the best way to find self-identity?
19. If you don’t feel loved does that mean you are not loved?
20. Are you always supposed to feel good about everything you are? Would that be the main goal of your identity?
21. Who does your identity belong to?
22. How does sanctification, holiness, sin, transformation, and growth affect a true self?
23. What lines exist between ‘shamming’ and ‘challenge’?
24. Does God have a hyper-specific plan for your life? What happens if you miss it?
25. How does being ‘in Christ’ affect your identity?
26. How does being ‘filled with the Holy Spirit’ affect your identity?
27. When should/shouldn’t you be expected to nuance, yield, change, or remove aspects from your identity?

Some of these are pretty pedantic, and I’m purposely not answering them. We need to work through them ourselves against the backdrop of gospel theology. My point is that we need to tread more carefully as influential youth leaders in order to help young people grow as healthy people who trust in God and know how to navigate life well. There’s far too much inconsistency in how we teach on identity – and it’s too easy to prop up fluffy assumptions and broad sweeping ideologies that just don’t help those young people truly grow.

These subtle distinctions and contradictions, taught at the level of identity, will war with each other inside a young person’s mind into adulthood. Let’s take this seriously, give nuance its day, and deepen our understanding of identity. There are few worthier topics worth this amount of effort to unstick and undergird.

All the best!

Photo by Carson Arias on Unsplash

Some folk have been asking me about my research recently, and I kinda dread the question. It’s a mixture of complicated to explain and difficult to justify. So, I thought I’d take a few minutes to answer some questions for those who are interested.

What’s your research title?

‘An exegetical and socio-historical examination into the identity and missional significance of the people group known as ‘God-fearers’ in the Book of Acts, with some exploration of their potential contemporary equivalence.’

What’s an easier way of saying that?

Who are those God-fearers in the book of Acts, why were they important, and do they still exist in some form today?

Who are ‘God-fearers’?

There’s a range of possible views from pious Jews, to interested Gentiles, to proselytes/Jewish converts, to a formal Gentile group within the synagogues, to, well nobody; just a group that Luke made up to make a literary point. I think that they are probably some form of 1^st-5^th Century Gentiles with an interest in the monotheism, ethics, and rituals of Judaism – at least enough to attend or donate to a synagogue – but they haven’t converted or won’t due to their social position. But there’s much more to be said, and even that was really pretty speculative at best.

Can you break that into parts?

Part 1. Lit review. Looking at just about everything that’s been written on God-fearers, inc. primary evidence from archeological and epigraphical sources.

Part 2. Exegesis. Studying the book of Acts, and particularly the God-fearer/God-worshipper passages in detail. Who they were and how they functioned within the narrative.

Part 3. Missiology. Looking at which (if any) contemporary groups might overlap with this historic group, and whether similar mission practices might produce similar results.

Why this topic?

I first became interested in God-fearers while studying them for an undergrad essay nearly fifteen years ago. Since then I’ve kept up with the research culminating in my MA dissertation in 2018 (for which I earned a distinction). They seemed to have had a massive impact within Paul’s missionary work, yet we know very little definitive about them. I can’t help but feel they hold the key to the massive expansion of the early church and could perhaps help us engage in more effective mission today.

What are you going to have to learn?

Areas of research will include Second Temple Judaism, early Christianity, early Roman history, advanced Greek, broad New Testament studies and criticism, genre theories, cultural (and religious) hybridity theory, some archaeological methods, social network theory (no, not the online one), and of course exegesis and hermeneutics at a high level. I’ll also need to learn German and maybe French because some research isn’t available in English.

Why are you not studying youth work?

Although this will have an impact on my youth work, my first passion has always been knowing God better through broader biblical theology – especially the New Testament. I believe that committing to know God and His Word better is the best training you can have for any ministry. I’ll keep seeking to grow as a youth worker through reading, experience, and training – but not in this particular academic arena.

Why are you not studying at a Bible College?

I’ve done that twice already and wanted a change. I’m also suspicious that I’ll need to work harder to defend my assumptions within a non-confessional network of people who don’t share my baseline convictions. I was also looking for a different challenge, and a bigger set of resources to lean on. Finally, I met a very knowledgeable supervisor that understands my area better than anyone else that I’ve spoken to so far – and he doesn’t work for a Bible College.

How are you doing this while working?

I’m taking the PhD part time, so it’s probably going to be a six-year adventure. I’m studying for a bit every morning on weekdays, attending online seminars a couple of times a week, and I’m meeting semi-regularly online with a supervisor. It fits around my job.

Are you going to leave at the end of it and become a nerdy professor or something?

That’s not my plan. I’m always open to God’s leading, and who knows where I’ll be at 39 or 40 years old! (Which is when I’ll be finished). But there are no plans right now to move on from what I’m doing.

What can I pray for?

Thank you. Pray for me to find Jesus in my studies, and to become a deeper disciple. Pray for my health – that I remember to eat, sleep, and exercise well; and pray for me to be a loving husband and quality youth leader during this time. Pray for the research to bear fruit, make sense, and actually change lives. Thanks. 🙂