From Josh Patrick, Lead Minister of the 4th Avenue Church of Christ in Franklin, TN.
O Jesus meek and humble of heart, Hear me.
From the desire of being esteemed,
From the desire of being loved,
From the desire of being extolled,
From the desire of being honored,
From the desire of being praised,
From the desire of being preferred to others,
From the desire of being consulted,
From the desire of being approved,
Deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being humiliated,
From the fear of being despised,
From the fear of suffering rebukes,
From the fear of being calumniated,
From the fear of being forgotten,
From the fear of being ridiculed,
From the fear of being wronged,
From the fear of being suspected,
Deliver me, Jesus.
That others may be loved more than I,
That others may be esteemed more than I,
That in the opinion of the world, others may increase, and I may decrease,
That others may be chosen and I set aside,
That others may be praised and I unnoticed,
That others may be preferred to me in everything,
That others may become holier than I, provided that I become as holy as I should,
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it. Amen.
Written by Cardinal Merry del Val.
I’ve been wrestling with this question for quite some time.
My background: I started “preaching” when I was in grade school. I competed in speech as a kid for Leadership Training for Christ. I spoke on Sunday nights occasionally for my dad, who was a preaching minister in the churches I grew up in for 20+ years. Old ladies told me I should grow up to be a preacher. I went to college and got training to be a preacher. During graduate school I was privileged to apprentice in preaching with two extremely gifted preachers.
In short, I was groomed to preach.
Yet I’ve dealt with increasing dissonance about preaching in the three years I’ve been involved in church planting (preaching, at least, as it has been framed up and defined in my lifetime) for at least 4 reasons:
1) Many of the disconnected adults I’m living among are increasingly skeptical of listening to a single individual who presumes to speak authoritatively to them – which I lump in the category of institutional suspicion that is so prevalent among emerging generations/culture. They are much more keen on communal dialogue and discernment.
2) If I’m honest, preaching in my experience does not equip people to follow Jesus at the deepest levels – in other words, it is not transformative in the way life-on-life discipleship and coaching are. Preaching functions on the level of information/cognition, no matter how funny, emotive or storied the sermon is. Discipleship, however, requires not just information but also imitation – a severe limitation of monological preaching. What bothers me is that in many churches it seems that preaching is relied on as the primary mechanism of disciple-making – yet it is inherently limited.
3) The approach to preaching in the scriptures seems significantly different than the way we practice it now. For instance, preaching in the early church seems much more dialogical than today’s monological preaching. Someone was able to ask a question of Peter in his great Pentecost sermon in Acts 2. Jesus’ best teaching moments were either in response to a question someone else asked, or a question he asked someone else.
4) The contemporary practice of preaching has contributed to an unhealthy consumer orientation and celebrity culture in American Christianity. When people don’t come to a Sunday service because their favorite preacher isn’t speaking that day, there’s a problem. And so the favorite preacher doesn’t take a break very often, which is also a problem on a few levels: a) the celebrity/icon status that preachers receive can erode their souls; b) no other preachers are able to be trained up within the congregation because inevitably few are as good initially as the celebrity preacher; c) all this panders to the idea of church as “vendor of religious goods and services” that subverts the influence of the gospel in North America.
Hugh Halter, in his book AND, makes some challenging comments about preaching that really resonate with me:
This may sound a bit crass, but here’s the real deal: most churches spend the majority of their staff time and financial resources paying for and preparing to deliver a sixty-minute program, which prioritizes preaching. All of this, even though within twenty minutes, most adults have forgotten 95 percent of what they just heard. If the church were like a business, that would be like putting 90 percent of your investment portfolio into a product that has not produced growth for the last forty years. It’s like the Houston Rockets giving Yao Ming 90 percent of the team’s salary budget and running 90 percent of the plays through him, making him responsible for shooting 90 percent of the shots and still expecting the team to win. Or it’s like trying to get your car to drive nicely when you only have one of the four wheels with an actual tire on it.
I think you get the point. We need to make intentional investment choices, and yes, you still need a 7 ft. 6 in. Chinese center on your basketball team, and you’ll certainly need that one good tire on your car. These are all important, but you’ll need a lot more than just those things. None of them can carry the load by themselves. The church service with a sermon has and always will be necessary and helpful, but if used as the main way of making missional disciples, it falls far short.
Let me be clear to say that I think preaching is important. Young adults need to hear the scriptures preached and learn to hear the voice of God through it. Preaching does equip people with important information they need to follow Jesus. And even if our approach is a bit different than early church preaching, that’s not to say that God has not used preachers powerfully – because God has.
My question is not whether or not preaching is important, but whether or not we have put too much emphasis on preaching; caused it to bear a weight it was never intended to bear; put all our discipleship eggs in the preaching basket when it was only made to hold a couple of them.
The four reasons above are part of what has caused me to revision my preaching/teaching life in the Storyline Community. For instance:
Dialogue with me about this! How do these thoughts resonate with or rub against you? What reactions do you have?
Part one addressed how Storyline is changing in its approach to discipleship. Part two addressed how Storyline is changing structurally. This final post in this series addresses how Storyline is changing in regard to starting new churches and training church planters.
My calling into church planting is not to plant a single church. It’s to participate in a church planting movement.
That’s what attracted me to the leaders of Mission Alive, our church planting resource organization, whose dream is to facilitate church planting movements all over North America.
And that’s why reproduction has been programmed into the DNA of the Storyline Community. Reproduction is one way we practice mission: reproducing followers of Jesus; reproducing churches in our network; and reproducing communities that will live a similar missional existence in a different locale.
In the fall of 2010, Storyline got its first taste of starting new churches when we sent Micah and Amy Lewis to Wichita, Kansas, to start a new church in downtown Wichita. They were sent after an 18-month period of training with Storyline and are partnering with the RiverWalk Church in Wichita. Storyline continues to support them financially through the Mission Alive Harvest Fund and through monthly contributions. I also serve as a church planting coach for Micah.
One thing I learned through this experience: a church doesn’t have to have all of its ducks in a row to be a church planting church.
That’s the great thing about the kingdom: the power of partnership — the power of collaboration (another one of Storyline’s values).
In the kingdom, young churches like Storyline can partner together with established churches like RiverWalk in Wichita — which have significant financial resources among other things. Young churches can partner with resource organizations like Mission Alive — which has well-developed mechanisms for assessment, equipping and coaching for church planting.
Relatively new churches like Storyline bring something to the table, too: the experience of church planting. The feeling of the missional frontier. A test laboratory experience that has elements of risk but is safer and more stable than church planting from scratch. Pre-existing structures and methods for mission that stir the imagination and prepare future church planters for their calling.
Who says a single church has to do church planting on its own? Young churches, established churches, and resource organizations need each other. They need to work together for the sake of church planting. Each will likely miss something if they attempt to go at it on their own.
Storyline, as a young church, wants to play its role well in this kingdom endeavor. We want to play to our strengths.
As a result, Storyline will become a more significant training ground for future church planters. We want to see the story of Micah and Amy Lewis multiplied many times over.
We’re dreaming about helping to start five new churches in the next five years.
We’re issuing an open invitation to anyone sensing the call into missional church planting to have a conversation with us about training with Storyline.
Church Planting Residency Overview:
Church Planter in Residence Profile:
I’d love to bring in 2-3 families this fall to begin our work together. And I suspect that God may raise up longer term co-workers with Storyline out of those who come to train for church planting. All of that will have to be discerned along the way.
Are you interested, or know someone who might be? Contact us!
You can email me and let me know. At that point we’ll begin the interview process to discern if there’s a good fit for training with the Storyline Community.
Please pray for Storyline as we seek to continue to be used by God in the emerging church planting movement in North America.
The first post in this series addressed how Storyline does discipleship. This post addresses how Storyline is structured.
I’ve always struggled to find literature and resources for methodology and structure that spoke to Storyline’s context. As a network of house churches that meets all together for a monthly gathering and every remaining weekend for house church gatherings, we fall in between the poles of ministry structure from which most material on church methodology is produced.
On one end, you have the traditional church growth, Sunday service-oriented, high impact, programmatic, megachurch literature. Think Andy Stanley; Rick Warren; Nelson Searcy. There’s some good stuff there, but it doesn’t fit a community that does not have as its primary strategy to grow by increasing the attendance of its weekend services.
On the other end is the simple, organic, house church, non-institutional, micro-church literature. Think Neil Cole; Wolfgang Simpson; Frank Viola. There’s some very good stuff here, too, but most of this literature is geared for individual organic communities that don’t ever exceed more than 20-30 people in size. Storyline, however, is structured as a network of house churches. A network has more organizational structure and different size dynamics than a single house church. So while Storyline shares most of the values of the missional paradigm found often in more organic-type churches, it is more structured than most.
As you can imagine, it’s been difficult finding mentors and resources to speak directly at what we’re experimenting with in the Storyline Community. For a long time, the most helpful by far were Hugh Halter and Matt Smay – particularly their book AND. The community they started in Denver, CO – Adullam – has a large gathering every Sunday, but is held together by a network of “incarnational communities” or “villages” that lives on mission in various neighborhoods. Still, the weekly frequency of Adullam’s large gatherings has different implications for them than for Storyline.
And then…
I discovered 3DM and “Missional Communities.”
The mental grenade was first thrown by Alan Hirsch at a small training event I attended for church planters in October 2010. He said, “The small group, nuclear family, 6-12 people approach to church is not sustainable. The structure of the early church centered on the form of oikos, an extended family household, usually between 20-50 people.”
As a house church planter, I knew he was right. Before that point, I had not been ready to admit it. The recent transitions and plateau in Storyline had prepared me to own up to it.
I later discovered that Hirsch was drawing on the very important work of Mike Breen (and company) around “Missional Communities.” In the past 20 years, they had facilitated the start of hundreds of missional communities all over Europe. In fact, the European Church Planting Network (associated with Leadership Network), adopted the MC approach and started more than 720 churches in three years (2006-2009). That’s a first in European church history.
Mike Breen has since moved to South Carolina and is training American pastors and church planters in this approach through the resource organization 3DM.
After years of demand, they finally produced a “field manual” in November 2010 for starting missional communities called Launching Missional Communities. I bought it and devoured it; it was worth every bit of the unusually high price ($29.95).
The Wikipedia article on “Missional Communities” (I suspect written by Breen or someone on his team) defines them as follows:
A Missional Community (also called Clusters, Mid-Sized Communities, Mission-Shaped Communities, MSCs) is a group of anything from 20 to 50 or more people who are united, through Christian community, around a common service and witness to a particular neighborhood or network of relationships. With a strong value on life together, the group has the expressed intention of seeing those they impact choose to start following Jesus, through this more flexible and locally incarnated expression of the church. The result will often be that the group will grow and ultimately multiply into further Missional Communities. Missional Communities are most often networked within a larger church community (often with many other Missional Communities). These mid-sized communities, led by laity, are “lightweight and low maintenance” and most often meet 3-4 times a month in their missional context.
When I read this, I thought, “this is Storyline!”
The only difference is the group size of Storyline house churches – which have ranged from 5-25 – when compared with missional communities. And that difference alone has proven to be significant, for at least two reasons:
1. The fragility of smallness.
2. The social energy required to multiply.
As a result, we’ve sensed God leading us to shift our approach from developing a network of small group-sized churches (5-20 people) to developing a network of mid-sized group churches (20-50+ people).
Here’s what it means practically for Storyline:
Please pray for us as we live into this new approach to structure and mission.
And stay tuned for the final segment of the three-part series about How Storyline is Changing. I’ll discuss how Storyline will become even more of a training ground for future church planters.
In the Storyline 