The video above is of David Fitch, pastor at Life on the Vine in suburban Chicagoland. David is a brilliant thinker who lovingly addresses some of today’s most important issues for the church. His book, The Great Giveaway, was formational for me several years ago in helping me to process what the mission of the church is and how we might move forward in forming communities of faith that embody that mission.

The video above is helpful because he lays out clearly what Christendom was, and why we in North America live in a post Christian culture now. I’ve had a few conversations over the past several weeks that led me to realize that many, many Christians continue to assume that we live in a Christian society, and therefore hold assumptions about church planting and communicating the Gospel that are no longer valid in many of our contexts. To be sure, there are still pockets of populations in America for whom the old assumptions are still true. However, more and more, especially in urban contexts, and particularly on the West coast, people no longer have a basic understanding of Jesus and Christianity, and no longer view Christianity as a valid belief system. If we are going to communicate the Gospel within those settings, we have to reconsider the ways the church forms and functions, including the way in which we plant new churches.

The video is 15 minutes, and well worth your time to understand some of these issues.

This week’s chapter of The Tangible Kingdom began with the question, “what is incarnational?” The previous chapter asked the question, “what is missional?” I think that understanding one within the context of the other is so helpful and important. One thing that we’ve noticed in our group going through the workbook, is that the idea of “mission” is not something that a lot of us immediately connect with. It’s an interesting observation, and one that I’ve noticed before with my friends who do not follow Jesus.  ”Mission” has a certain connotation that brings to mind a project to be done, or a goal to be accomplished. There are even harsher connotations rooted in our particular culture and history surrounding some of the early American settlers and their “mission” to native people groups; the idea of “manifest destiny” in the States; and further back into the Inquisition and the Crusades. “Mission” is a term that I’m not sure is helpful all of the time. Mostly because for so many people, they have too often seen or felt the results of “mission” and have yet to see or feel the depth of incarnation.

What this chapter attempted to point out is that mission, when separated from incarnation, is indeed harmful. Christians who value mission over incarnation can be seen yelling on street corners, protesting abortion clinics, and picketing strip clubs (sometimes with unexpected, and hilarious results!). Mission and Incarnation then, are “inseparable twins”.

From the book:

This is why missional has an inseparable twin. The word is incarnational. It means “to take on flesh.” If missional means “to go,” incarnation is about how you go and what people see as you go. It encompasses your posture, your tone, your motives, and your heart. Incarnation is critical because it will eventually determine whether or not people will want to know you or your God.

As our primary model, we looked at Jesus’ life, and the people he interacted with. Jesus gained a reputation of being a “friend of sinners”, and while he always spoke the truth about sin and people’s need for forgiveness, it was the religious who were agitated by him and the “sinners” who were drawn to him. Jesus’ posture toward people was unique among the religious leaders of his day, and seemingly refreshing and intriguing to those outside the religious/political power structure.

Among our groups’ conversation last night, it became pretty clear that everybody was very comfortable with the idea of incarnation, in that everybody could easily share about people in their lives who do not follow Jesus with whom they have good relationships with. In fact, it seems that many of us are more comfortable being in friendships with these “sojourners” than we are with many of the religious people we know. (I’m not saying that’s always good. Some, myself included, have much cynicism that we need to move past).

The biggest question for us last night, was how to marry mission and incarnation. If we are so comfortable with friends who don’t trust Jesus, how do we maintain the trust we’ve developed while being authentic enough to share our own story and faith in Jesus. Some very good questions and conversation arose out of that.

• When does my lack of pointing out a friends’ sin and/or bad decisions actually become a lack of love for them?
• How do I maintain a posture of both grace and truth in my friendships with sojourners?
• Is there an ultimate goal for us in relationships? To see a friend “get saved”? Doesn’t that create a motive that puts the relationship out of balance?
• What does it look like to trust the Holy Spirit to guide us in our day to day lives and relationships?

Overall, three weeks in, our little community is becoming more and more comfortable with each other, sharing about our lives, doubts, and struggles in ways that are inviting and encouraging to one another. It’s so good to be with a group of people who genuinely want to trust Jesus, not be jerks, and make our communities and neighborhoods a better place for everybody to live.

Personally, I’m really looking forward to our time together next week. We’ll be taking a look at “The Gospel” and discussing what Jesus says the Gospel is as compared to what we have often made the Gospel to be. Spoiler Alert! The Gospel as being only and entirely about the salvation of individual souls is a conception of the Gospel rooted in the Enlightenment and Western thought. The Gospel Jesus lived and proclaimed is much larger and encompassing than that…

I live in Seattle. Not the greater Seattle area, not the Puget Sound region. The city of Seattle, in the Fremont neighborhood. This is the place and people that I feel compelled to work among, calling them to faith in Jesus and working from within this place and culture to disciple people in the ways of Jesus here in Seattle. Now, I’m not a guy who believes that urban is superior to suburban, rural, etc. Every place has its’ unique pros and cons, challenges, unique sins, beauty, and opportunities and challenges for the Gospel.

Every place is unique. And every place needs Christ followers who are fully committed to the welfare of the people they live among and to engaging Jesus’ redemptive mission in the city, suburb, and neighborhood in which they find themselves.

As somebody who lives, works, and desires to see disciples made and churches formed in Seattle, it would be strange for me, and for anybody listening to me, to talk as though I were doing this work in Tacoma, or Bellevue, or Tukwila. Yet I see this happening over and over again as new churches form in cities such as Lynnwood, Tukwila, Mill Creek, Bothell, etc. When I visit the websites of new and forming churches in these cities, it actually takes some time and investigation to realize that they are not planting in Seattle at all, but rather in another city in the area. I have to say, this confuses me beyond belief! If you want to work for the Gospel in Seattle, great! Move into Seattle and begin to incarnate yourself in a neighborhood in this city. But if you want to plant a church in Redmond, than do everything possible to fully incarnate yourself and your team into the people and places of Redmond. For some reason, so many people feel a need to talk about their work and new church as though they are planting churches in Seattle. I think this does a great dis-service to your city, neighborhood, and church community.

I’ve been involved in new churches in cities outside of Seattle, and I talked about those churches within the context of the city we were planting in; not in the context of Seattle.

The uniqueness of your city, and the people who live there, when viewed in light of the Gospel, require you to fully engage that particular place and people. The best thing you can do as you begin to make disciples and form churches is to acknowledge your location, and learn everything you possibly can about it.

Some random questions that bother me:

Why would you put a picture of Pike Place market on your website when your city has a weekly farmers market you can highlight?

Why would you learn and cite statistics about the people of Seattle while you ignore the things you could learn about your city?

Why does your promotional video show you driving around the streets of downtown Seattle when you’re actually planting a church in Bellevue?

Does holding a cup of coffee with the space needle in the background really make you more relevant to the people in Woodinville? Wouldn’t a glass of wine in front of one of Woodinville’s wineries be so, so much better?

I don’t mean to rant. But it seems like you don’t love your city. It seems like you’re sneaking around behind her back, thinking there’s something more exciting someplace else. Jesus loves your city, and He’s placed you there to become an intimate part of that place and those people in order to demonstrate His love for Redmond, Woodinville, Tacoma, Bothell, Bellevue, Lynnwood…

Go ♥ your own city…please.

That’s how I think I would sum up much of our conversation this last Tuesday night. We have finished the first week of The Tangible Kingdom primer, and had gathered together to eat, pray, and discuss our experience over the last week. The first week of the workbook is a guide to the question “What is missional?”. Using the story of Abraham as a base for the idea of God’s people being a sent people, each day of the workbook asked probing questions about our values, our hopes, and our actual experiences in being “sent” to the people and places among whom we find ourselves.

Most of the conversation on Tuesday centered around the realization that, for us, much of our training and discipleship within our church experience has centered on individual habits and practices to use as metrics of our spiritual growth. Daily Bible reading, personal prayer time, fasting, etc. There’s nothing wrong with developing those habits in our lives, but there is the nagging sense that those habits, as individual metrics of personal spiritual growth, do very little, if anything, to form us into a people. It could be argued that this framework of spiritual growth is a result of the prominence of the individual experience that Western thought has held onto as something of up-most importance since the Enlightenment. Since spiritual growth is something to be achieved individually, within your “personal relationship” with Jesus, we have formed many, many individuals who know Scripture well, and can clearly articulate all the basic tenants of faith in Jesus, and yet have no idea how to live together as a family, intentionally working together to bring wholeness and restoration to our neighborhoods.

I think my experience, which seemed to be echoed by others on Tuesday, was a slight offense at the ideas that the workbook was asking us to wrestle with. Having grown up among God’s people, been educated in a Christian university, and being involved in Christian service, here was a workbook, pointing me to Scripture and asking me questions that revealed that I do not know how to live with other believers as a family and missionally engage my culture! How dare it!

The good news is that everybody in our group desires to go further in learning these new missional and community habits. Week by week we will discover how to set aside our presumptions about Jesus-like living, and further engage the idea that our relationship with Jesus is intended to be lived out with, among, and for others.

Week by week. Together.

This last Tuesday evening, a group of us gathered in our apartment to begin an 8 week introduction to missional and incarnational living and habits. We are using The Tangible Kingdom Primer as a resource to help guide us through the questions surrounding what it looks like for a group of Christ followers to fully incarnate themselves into the neighborhoods in which they live, forming a community which points to the present and future reign of Jesus and His Kingdom. If we are going to see a movement of disciple making in Seattle, resulting in the visible presence of Jesus on every block, in every neighborhood, in all of Seattle, it will be because Christ followers all over the city begin to re-orient their lives around the mission of Jesus in their neighborhoods, while begging Jesus to give us new disciples to send into new neighborhoods to incarnate the body of Christ in new ways, resulting in even more new disciples, and on, and  on, and on…

So many great churches all over the city are experimenting with ways in which to scatter themselves in tangible ways into their neighborhoods, and I couldn’t be more excited about that! Some of the folks in this little group will end up working with us to do that as a part of Ekklesia Communities, and others will continue to work with their current church families with a fresh experience of how to live a missional life in their contexts. Both outcomes are great wins for the church in Seattle! It is my prayer that we will walk away from the next 8 weeks together with more than just a theoretical idea of what this looks like, and instead have some flesh to put on the skeleton of Ekklesia Communities. I am praying that many of the folks who are taking this 8 week journey together will take the leap into participating in this with us long term. And my greatest prayer is that we would see new disciples join us as we  join Jesus in His mission in our neighborhoods together.

This first week we simply got to know one another a bit and shared our current experiences of the neighborhoods we live in. We discovered that some people are intentionally living in a particular place, and others have simply found themselves living somewhere, unaware of Jesus’ potential purposes in placing them there. We also discovered that some people have other neighborhoods that they feel compelled to move into. It will be exciting and interesting to see what changes might take place in some people’s living situations as we awaken to Jesus’ purpose and mission.

I’ll post a weekly update after our Tuesday night gatherings to share some of what we are learning and discovering along the way. We may also start up a second group on Sunday evenings, as we don’t want one group to get too big to accomplish the things we want to accomplish. If you’re interested in being a part of such a group for 8 weeks, you can email me at joejmacias[at]gmail.com.

Today I spent 10 minutes just playing two chords, Am and Dm, back and forth, switching between them with one strum each. The idea is to spend a few minutes just switching between two chords in order to develop finger strength and speed, and to allow your hands to memorize the positions of each chord. I hate this particular chord change. I know to more experienced guitarists, I sound like a kid who hasn’t been potty trained yet, it’s so second nature to you, but I’m a novice, and this chord change doesn’t come easy to me. Another one I hate is E to D. These two changes are the bane of my short lived guitar playing existence right now!

I’m working through a series of online guitar lessons, which is actually working pretty well for me. You can find it here if you’re interested. The instructor, Justin, says something over and over again that I hate, but it moves me forward in my ability to play. He says, “Practice what you can’t do, don’t practice what you can”. By that he’s saying that if I find a particular chord change or progression easy, than don’t spend much time working on it, but if I come across anything that I find particularly difficult, put my practice time and energy into that, even though it’s hard, and even frustrating. It’s been good advice. I can switch between A and D, or A and E like a knife through butter, but spending my practice time on those chord changes won’t make me a better guitar player, I’ll just be the guy who can play three chords really, really well, but nothing else! Rather, spend my time on those difficult chord changes. Not only will they become easier, but the rest of my playing will improve as a result.

As I move forward in developing disciples and planting a new church, I’m encountering necessary skills that are proving to be new and difficult for me. One of those is one on one time with people. Whether it be casting vision, coaching, or discipling, I’m not great at intentional, one on one interactions. It drains me. I know that sounds strange for a pastor, but in reality, this is true of a lot of us. I can get a large crowd excited about toenail clippings; but I stumble over my words and lose my train of thought sitting across the table from one person talking about anything at all. I’ve spent a lot of time and energy developing my skills to speak in front of and lead crowds, but my training has neglected the one on one.

This is not good for the Gospel.

Jesus withdrew from the crowds to spend time with the few. I think it was Wendell Berry who said something like “the paradox of the parable of the lost sheep is that the one is more valuable than the many”. (forgive me if I messed up or mis-attributed that quote)

I’m going to spend lots of my practice time over the next few days focusing on that damn Am to Dm chord change. And I’m going to spend lots of intentional time over the next few years sitting with people one on one, listening, hearing, empathizing, and asking the Holy Spirit what He is up to in the conversation. It’s a skill that I, and many of us, need to develop.

How about you? What are you good at that you spend too much time practicing? What skills, even though they are difficult, should you be working on?

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 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 observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

-Jesus

As Jesus was leaving his disciples, his instructions were straightforward and clear, “Go and make disciples”. His earliest followers did just that, and through this simple strategy of making disciples and teaching them to trust and follow Jesus, millions of people began to follow Jesus in the subsequent years, and their world and ours was changed.

What if today we set aside many of our ideas of what church is, and settled on a simple definition of church, organized in simple ways, in order to facilitate the formation of new disciples, who then went and made more disciples? As these new disciples are sent together on mission, new churches would arise organically from within cultures and neighborhoods in Seattle!  What would this look like?

First, let’s set out what a church is:

A church is a group of people who have been called by Jesus, adopted into His family, and sent together on mission with Jesus

Within this definition, a church can be any size, small or large, as long as the people who participate in that church understand that they have been called by Jesus, they take care of each other as family members, and they work together on mission with Jesus in their context. In recent years, churches have been encouraged to make numerical growth a primary goal, creating huge local churches, drawing people from large geographical areas. After 30 years or so of the church growth movement, many people, including the strongest proponents of church growth strategies, are drawing the conclusion that the result of all these efforts have been a consolidation of believers into the churches that implement these growth strategies most effectively, instead of a mass movement of new disciples being made. A strong argument can be made that the essential functions of a church are best embodied and lived out by smaller, locally based communities of believers who take personal responsibility for making new disciples and for Jesus’ mission to their neighborhoods.  In our context, as new disciples are made, and spiritual and numerical growth occurs, we will:

Form neighborhood based Missional Communities.

Missional Communities are groups of 10-30 disciples who have organized together in order to live out the rhythms of disciple life among each other for the benefit of their local block/apartment building/neighborhood.  These Missional Communities will constantly invite others who are not yet disciples to participate in these rhythms, and by doing so draw them to intentionally follow Jesus.

Missional Communities are not only Bible studies, small groups, or weekly gatherings. Rather, MC’s are little churches; locally based groups of believers who have been called by Jesus, take care of each other as family members, and participate together in Jesus’ mission in their context.

Missional Communites participate together in the rhythms of disciple life, share meals together, watch each other’s children, bless each other, disciple one another, identify ways to serve their neighborhoods together, and identify a specific people group to whom they will regularly and intentionally demonstrate the love and grace of Jesus in order to make new disciples. As new disciples are made, there will be a need for us to:

Develop Servants.

As Missional Communities grow and develop, we will identify those within the communities who have the gifts necessary to begin new Missional Communities and provide the spiritual direction and oversight necessary for the growth of new disciples.  These leaders will be nurtured in what it means to serve and equip a group of disciples, and trained in pastoral care, incarnational habits, the study of Scripture and teaching, and theological issues.

As Missional Communities grow and servants emerge, new Missional Communities will be incarnated into the life of their neighborhoods. As more and more Missional Communites form in a given neighborhood, we will develop:

Area Gatherings

While the heart of ekklesia communities lies within the hyper local context of the Missional Communities, there is great value inherent in all disciples coming together on a regular basis to celebrate the grace of God and focus on His mission in Seattle.

We will identify several forms of larger corporate gatherings, which will occur regularly throughout each month with the purpose of equipping disciples to be on the mission of Jesus, celebrating what Jesus is doing in our midst, and sending disciples on mission into their local contexts.

We are a sent community, on mission, who gathers regularly to equip, celebrate, and send.

I think the questions we discussed help us to identify where our starting place might be as we seek to align our lives with Jesus’ mission in our context. Here they are in no particular order:

• Is there Biblical and historical precedent for this form of church life?
• What do the Missional Communities’ meetings look like?
• Do we tithe?
• Do the members of a Missional Community live in the same neighborhood as each other?
• Does our context (Seattle) require churches to take on new forms?
• How do we foster age & racial diversity within each Missional Community?
• Will there be a theological framework that we operate within?
• What does leadership/eldership look like in this form of church?
• What are the “rhythms of a disciple”?
• Will we give the network a name? And/or will we name each Missional Community?
• How do we address changing organizational needs as growth occurs?
• Are the Missional Community meeting times an appropriate place for not yet disciples to visit?
• How does an Missional Community determine when to change the people group they are seeking to reach?
• Who is responsible for leading each Missional Community?
• How are they identified and trained?
• What happens if a nutjob/heretic/predator launches a Missional Community?

These were all such excellent questions, and we discussed them at length during our time together. I won’t talk about any answers in this post, though I may discuss some of these questions on the blog over the next few weeks and months.

What do you think? Are there any questions you have that were not brought up here? Do you have any thoughts or insight to any of these questions?

I’ve had plenty of experiences in my life related to ministry and my chosen pastoral vocation. I’ve started and led small groups, designed outreach events for thousands of people, led groups on home and foreign missions trips, designed and run week long summer camps, preached to groups ranging from dozens to thousands, helped start new churches, etc etc etc. That might sound great, but believe me, any list of my failures and screw-ups would break this blog with it’s length! The point here, is that I’ve done a lot of what has been expected of me, having chosen ministry as my vocation. But I’ve never done this.

The chairs were put out, the food was on the table, the playlist was playing and people were starting to arrive in our living room. I was ready to run. I was secretly hoping that every last person who said they were coming would suddenly have some sort of last minute emergency, their dog threw up, a flat tire, they suddenly had to go get a mole removed, anything that would keep my living room empty and free me from being forced into this thing that I myself started!

But here they were, a dozen set of eyes staring at me, waiting for me to speak up and explain myself. I had never done this before. I had never sat eye to eye with a group of people who knew me, good and bad, and invited them to participate in a complete re-working of how we define, organize, and operate as a church in Seattle. I had never set before a small group of people, knowing that I did not have all the answers, and ask them to trust Jesus with me as we set out on this journey.

I had invited a group of friends together to share my thoughts on what a new church might look like in Seattle, and ask them to consider participating in this new community. I have presented ideas and vision plenty of times, to plenty of groups, but somehow, this was different. I knew that I would be inviting this group of people to reconsider most everything we know about what a church is and how it operates, and dive with me into the deep end of the unknown of forming new disciples and planting neighborhood based missional communities and churches on every block, in every neighborhood,  in all of Seattle. I wasn’t just asking them to be a part of a cool new church with cool new fonts and graphics, targeted at a cool, young demographic. I was asking them to abandon most of our pursuits in previous church life, and re-align our lives with a few simple practices to make disciples and form missional communities. They would either laugh me out of the room, or begin to awaken to Jesus’ redemptive mission here in Seattle.

I have good friends. None of them laughed.

Some of them teared up. Most of them asked intriguing questions. All of them agreed to consider participating in this thing.

Overall, I think the evening went really well. After a few days of reflection, I have just a few thoughts, and maybe a couple of best practices, for myself and for anybody else who might be attempting to initiate a similar movement in other cities.

I need to grow in looking to Jesus as my source of confidence. It takes a little while for me to feel confident about what I’m talking about in front of a group of people. If there is some initial positive reaction or engagement from folks, my confidence increases and I feel more comfortable with what I am presenting. The approval of people is an idol in my life that needs to be replaced by Jesus’ grace.

Many people have thought the same thoughts as I about church, but don’t know how to implement new practices and forms in their lives. Over and over, I hear from people that the idea of simplifying our form of church and increasing the expectations on every disciple making new disciples is something they have long been thinking, and are looking for people and opportunities to do that with.

Stay focused on Jesus. There were lots of great questions during the evening, and almost all of them could be answered by looking together at what Jesus said about His people. When in doubt, find out what Jesus says.

“I don’t know” is the only answer sometimes. There were other questions that were simply unknowable at this point. Yes, I could have BS’d my way through them and made it look like I knew 100% what I was talking about, but six years of marriage have taught me that’s a bad idea. In reality, there are lots of things that we will just need to find out together as we form this first missional community. I think I would have lost credibility if I pretended to know every answer. In addition, it would have sent the message that one person in our community has all the answers, and that completely defeats much of what we’re setting out to do.

Clarify expectations early. It would be easy to communicate what we’re doing as a simple, stripped down version of church and allow people to think that that means that there will be less expected of them along the way. I was clear to communicate that the purpose of stripping away the peripherals of church life is to lay the responsibilities of disciple life at all of our feet. As we navigate what this looks like, many of us will need to make major changes in our life to facilitate new practices and ways of life that so that all of life is lived with gospel intentionality. This will be the most exhilarating and the most difficult thing we will likely ever do. If it is easy, we are not doing it right.

We all have a lot of unlearning to do. We began to laugh at ourselves a bit during our conversation, because we recognized that so many of our questions were centered on how to do the weekly meetings; completely missing the point of whole life gospel intentionality. We demonstrated to each other that we have been deeply indoctrinated with religious trappings of church life, instead of renewed by the person and work of Jesus.

After our night, I wrote down all of the questions that were asked, and I’ll publish a post that lists all of the questions soon.  We had answers to many of them, but not to all of them. And I think the questions that are asked at this stage give us insight into how Jesus wants to work among us in this first missional community. There are a couple of dozen other people that I would like to have over for a similar night, so we’ll do one or two more of these gatherings before gaining commitment from 10-15 people to participate in this first community.

If you’re interested, first reconsider. Then, get a hold of me; I’d love to talk!