Help on Leading an Organic Church

Posted on June 12, 2008

As I continue to struggle and learn about leading a new, organic, missional church I have found that revision and change are quite common. This goes against my grain, as I want to have Austin City Life “figured out,” for which I am repenting. The church is not a problem to be solved or a company to be run; it is a community of Spirit-led disciples. The challenge for me is to keep coming back to the Spirit-ledness of my own discipleship and leadership, instead of relying on my well-reasoned plans alone.

Van Gelder’s The Ministry of the Missional Church has been a real help. His book integrates biblical theology of mission with organizational theory. In his chapter on Spirit-led growth and development he surveys the growth and development of the early church in Acts. His observations have been liberating and instructive in helping me follow the Spirit while leading an organic church. They have released me from self-imposed pressure to have the strategic plan nailed down and church ryhthms and structure perfected. Van Gelder notes that Spirit-led growth and development occur:

  1. In the context of conflict (Acts 6), where widows are neglected and, as a result, deacons are appointed. They did not have deacons figured out; the church responded to the Spirit in the midst of conflict in order to lead the missional church. It is okay to not know everything about everything, to have your entire leadership structure figured out, but look for the needs and meet them with Spirit-led, biblical paradigms.
  2. In adverse circumstances of Acts 8, the church was disobeying its missionary charge by remaining in Jerusalem. Persecution broke out that scattered Christians into Gentile territory, advancing the mission of the church. I run into adverse circumstances every week that drive me to prayer, but do they drive me into mission?
  3. From ministry in the margins in Acts 11, Jewish Christians began to learn more about the gospel and mission by sharing the faith with ethnically and culturally different peoples. As a result, the full breadth of mission began to take shape. This is really true in my experience. As I have been spending some time with Burmese refugees, God has been correcting me and my notions of church through this fledgling group of marginal christians and non-christians.
  4. From intentional strategy in Acts 13-19, where Paul and others sought converts from the culturally and theologically near people in synagogues. Most of us don’t need to hear this; we are too intentional in our strategies, so intentional that we strategize God out of our plans.
  5. From divine intervention in Acts 16, where God redirected Paul from Asia to Macedonia. In other words, be prepared to change, expect God to redirect, chuck your pride and open your eyes and ears to God’s providence in leading your church.
  6. From new insights into gospel and culture in Acts 10 & 15. Peter’s major shift on secondary issues like unclean and clean things after encountering Cornelius. See my comments on the marginal (#3). When I asked the Burmese house church leader if we could buy them Bibles (they only had six or so), she said: “Pray that they would be hungry.” This Burmese woman discipled me on the spot from her fresh vantage point of being a resource-dry pastor. She knew that buying Bibles doesn’t make disciples; God makes disciples by giving them a hunger for him.

“It is essential to have a strategy, but it is also essential to be alert to the disruptions and interruptions of the Spirit.”

Praying with Muller for the Demonstration of God

Posted on June 11, 2008

God is disposed to give himself to us, if we will only press into him. How can we receive of the bounty of God’s infinite goodness unless we pray? We have not because we ask not.

We become lifeless in ministry apart from him, as reminded by a friend this morning, the branch withers apart from the sap-flowing, life-sustaining vine. He is the Vine! And he ultimately calls us to come to him, not for the fruit of conversion or for the anointing in sermons or wisdom in counsel, but rather ,he is calling us to come to him for Him.

How do we come to him? We come to him in prayer, in the secret closet of communion with the holy Trinity.George Mueller has rightly been recognized as a man of prayer, a man who faithfully prayed and steadily restrained himself from asking others for money, financial support, to build five orphanages on Ashley Down and fill them with hundreds of abused, neglected, and abandoned children. He had the faith of ten thousand church planters, but beneath his great faith and prayer for God’s provision was a goal even more noble that housing and caring for orphans, a goal greater than ministry or church planting. Why did he not fundraise but “merely” pray for orphan provision? He writes:

I have refrained, because one of the primary objects of this Institution is, to bring before the world and the Church a tangible proof, how much even in this Nineteenth Century can be accomplished simply through the instrumentality of prayer and faith; and to give a clear demonstration, that God is now as much the Living God as He was Four Thousand years ago.

Brothers, we are in need of such a clear demonstration in the 21st century, not so much a demonstration of good works and godly provision, but a demonstration of the Living God. Mueller’s aim was ultimately the display of God’s living and abiding glory in a world that was prone to neglect and dismiss him. And should our aim as church planters, as pastors, as disciples of Jesus be any different? Should we not join Mueller on our knees, not supremely for his providential care or provision, but for Him, for a first-hand experience and demonstration of his sublime excellency and animated glory? To this end, may we pray, may we seek, and may we find him.