Planting Large Churches

Posted on August 7, 2013 by Richard Heyduck

One of the curious things I observe in some talk about church planting is the goal of planting “large churches.” Since I’ve never been a church planter (and have only read a few books on the subject), I’m obviously ignorant, but I wonder about a few things:

1. Why the emphasis on “large churches?” In at least some cases a large church is large because it has reached many people and won many people to faith in Christ. If this is what is in view, then “planting a large church” means “planting a church that wins many people to Christ.” That sounds like a good idea to me – exactly, in fact, what any church planter should aim for.

In some cases, a church is large because it has the critical mass (of people and resources) to offer programing that appeals to a large number of people. Now again, I think it is admirable to appeal to more people than to less. In this case, however, the largeness may come not from conversion growth but from the draining of members from churches that don’t have the resources to offer the quantity and quality of programming the large church can offer. If my goal as pastor is to win the people who are going to churches that are (in some sense) less than mine, my “large church” mentality seems less than entirely healthy.

Large churches might also profit from economies of scale. In an era when full time pastors cost more than ever, large churches are more likely to be able to afford and maintain a pastor – and often even more staff. Inasmuch as one might want to have a career working for a church, and be able to support one’s family doing so, this, while not an entirely spiritual-sounding objective, is certainly understandable.

Large churches also often seem more respectable. Their pastors garner more attention. The public – at least the Christian public – may think of them as smarter, more skilled, or more worthy of attention than pastors of smaller churches. If we want to have the respect of others, a large church to pastor is better than a small church.

We might also seek to plant a large church if we believe that the dynamics of congregational life in such a church are more conducive to faith development and living the Christian life than are the dynamics of a small church. If children and youth need a dynamic professionally run program in order to come to faith, then sure, we’ll need a large church. If people need the possibility of anonymity and intimacy offered by the venues of large church worship services and large church small groups, then the large church is a necessity.

2. Would anyone want to plant a small church? I’d ask further, Would anyone want to pastor a small church?

Well, if one has a limited capacity and one takes one’s own capacity as determinative of what the church can accomplish, then sure, planting a small church makes good sense. In a small church there are fewer people and sometimes less less to do.

Or perhaps one thinks the purpose of the church is to have a family where everyone knows each other. Our human capacity to know and love individuals is limited. We can only handle so many. If we plant a small church we can likely get by with having a single worship service, a service where, conceivably, everyone can know everyone else.

We might also desire to plant a small church if we have the conviction that only people like us (the pure, the holy, the right-thinking, etc.) ought to be admitted. The WE are always in the minority, hence removing the necessity of a large church.

3. If I were a church planter my first thought wouldn’t be about size. Instead I’d think of these things:

– Instilling a congregational conviction that people need Jesus and that Jesus has called this congregation and brought it into being (at least partly) so that people in our neighborhood (and to the ends of the earth) might be brought to faith. Any church of any size that lacks such a conviction is misguided. I am repelled by the notion that any church might sit in comfort, rejoicing in being among the heaven-bound, callously leaving any outsiders to go to hell (even if it is “their own fault”).

– Evangelistic passion is essential. Any church, of whatever size, that thinks it is large enough, while people around it continue to lack faith in Jesus, is a church in dire circumstances. An evangelistically comfortable church is an oxymoron.

– We don’t just offer healing and restoration in Jesus’ name, but we equip and deploy saved sinners in the mission field. Any church, large or small, that thinks the work of ministry is only for the few, whether they be professionals or big time volunteers, is misguided.

– We need to avoid loving Large just because our consumeristic society loves large. In the Kingdom, size is not a necessary indicator of success.

What do you think about the talk of “planting large churches?”

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Karl Barth on the Modern Marginalization of Ecclesiology

Posted on August 7, 2013 by Richard Heyduck

In Church Dogmatics IV.1 p 150, Barth writes:

“It was an intolerable truncation of the Christian message when the older Protestantism steered the whole doctrine of the atonement—and with it, ultimately, the whole of theology—into the cul de sac of the question of the individual experience of grace, which is always an anxious one when taken in isolation, the question of individual conversion by it and to it, and of its presuppositions and consequences. The almost inevitable result was that the great concepts of justification and sanctification came more and more to be understood and filled out psychologically and biographically, and the doctrine of the Church seemed to be of value only as a description of the means of salvation and grace indispensable to this individual and personal process of salvation.”

I am in the process of trying to overcome my great ignorance of the work of Karl Barth. Since ChristianBook.com had works of the old edition for sale this summer for only $4.95 a volume, I filled in some of the parts missing from my collection. It’d be nice to have the new edition, but, alas, neither my budget nor my book shelf space had the room.

So here I am reading Barth on the doctrine of reconciliation. Once one gets past the wordiness, there’s lots of treasure here. He’s out to magnify Jesus – which sounds good to me.

In the section quoted above he’s taking the Protestant tradition to task for it marginalization of ecclesiology. We became so interested in the salvation of the individual that we forgot the church. I find his insights here completely on target. I’m looking forward to see what more he does with it, to see specifically if he goes beyond seeing the church as the arena of salvation, the place where the Spirit is at work. I have so much to learn.

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The Wrath of God

Posted on August 5, 2013 by Richard Heyduck

We modern believers often feel a need to take care of God – or at least God’s reputation. We have our ideals, and God had better live up to them.

One of our ideals is that anger (or, in its more primitive guise, wrath), is highly uncouth. We humans are not supposed to be angry. God is certainly not supposed to be angry. God is love. God’s love precludes anger.

One branch of American Presbyterians has recently rejected the popular modern hymn, In Christ Alone for its reference to the satisfaction of God’s wrath. Here is how that stanza of the hymn reads:

In Christ alone, who took on flesh
Fullness of God in helpless Babe
This gift of love and righteousness
Scorned by the ones He came to save

Til on that cross as Jesus died
The wrath of God was satisfied
For every sin on Him was laid
Here in the death of Christ I live

In plain language (if there is such a thing when dealing with theology), the hymn is saying that God’s wrath was satisfied when Jesus died on the cross. If this means that God is a cosmic bully who beat up Jesus to get his anger out, then sure, I’d have troubles with that line also. That reading of the language is where the feminist theologians see the atonement as divine child abuse: Dad’s angry, let’s beat up the kid. Though some may want to read the text that way, I don’t believe such a reading is necessary.

Looking at the issue from the bottom up, let’s consider God’s attitude toward sin. What does God see when looking at sin? From what I see in the Bible I’d say that God at least sees rebellion, rejection, brokenness – and a waste of the good potential offered to humans. God looks at sin and is broken-hearted for what it’s doing to people and to creation. God is angry that sin is so destructive, angry that people choose it over blessings, not just once or twice, but over and over. In Ezekiel 33:11 God pleads with Israel, “Turn, turn from your wicked ways! Why will you die, O House of Israel?”

Given this context, the satisfaction of God’s wrath/anger in Jesus’ crucifixion is not that God has gotten his (we have to use the masculine pronoun for God here, since this view of anger is often seen as a particularly masculine sin) anger out by torturing Jesus on the cross. Rather, Jesus, not only described by the tradition as “the only begotten Son,” but also as “God incarnate,” had taken all sin upon himself and absorbed all the evil the world could throw at him. “He who had no sin, became sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God.” Sin, that force which so provoked God’s wrath, had tried its best – going so far as killing Jesus. But God, in the resurrection, declared that sin did not get the last word.

I’d argue, then, that God is rightfully described as wrathful. I might expand what the hymn says by expanding the “satisfaction” of that wrath to include the resurrection. I’d surely, however, see this wrath as subsumed under the category and activity of God’s love. God’s anger is always and only a subservient expression or attribute of God’s love.

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Motivation

Posted on August 3, 2013 by Richard Heyduck

My jobs require me to motivate others. As a teacher, I have to motivate students to do the work that leads to learning. As a pastor, I have to motivate people to engage in the practices that constitute a life with Christ. As a teacher, knowing stuff is fairly easy. Motivation is extremely difficult. Likewise, as a pastor, some things are easy. Preaching, after all these years, comes fairly easily. Motivation? Still difficult.

John Maxwell deals with motivation in some recent blog posts. Comparing types of motivation he says,

The best motivation is self-motivation. In fact, not many people succeed in life without self-generated drive. If you rely on others to energize you, or hesitate until the right mood hits, or delay until circumstances are ideal, then you’ll spend most of your life waiting. Leaders motivate themselves internally rather than depending on external incentives.

We are at a point in academia now where the message I hear is that faculty have the job of motivating students to learn. When the siren calls of tv, music, parties, games, even doing nothing, call so loudly, we’re supposed to motivate students to put themselves to the activities of learning instead.

We assume it’s possible to motivate others. But is it? In another post Maxwell claims that it’s not. What looks like motivating others is awakening in them the self-motivation already present. So is there any hope? Maxwell thinks there is:

To stir up the innate motivation in others, we must see through their eyes and feel through their emotions. As a leader, your goal isn’t to provide people with the enthusiasm to act, but to discover the desires that naturally animate them. Over the course of an hour-long dinner conversation you can almost always identify what makes another person tick by asking three simple questions.

In my role of pastor, I know how to do this. I visit with people – in their homes, in their workplaces, over a meal – and talk with them. I enter their worlds and learn where they’re going. I’m still trying to figure out how to do it as a teacher, given the highly-structured nature of the classroom, and the fact that I tend to have 5 classes and 120-150 students each semester. I do know that motivation requires treating them as individuals, not merely as some sort of student object, like a piece of clay to be molded.

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Holiness: Individual & Communal

Posted on June 17, 2013 by Richard Heyduck

One of the books I’m currently reviewing is Discipleship that Transforms: An Introduction to Christian Education from a Wesleyan Holiness Perspective. As I work on the review, I’ll make some peripheral comments here that might be of wider interest.

In the introduction that explains the rationale for the book, editor John H. Aukerman says, “Holiness begins with the individual, bur it must not end there. Personal holiness is necessary, but not sufficient. It is God’s will to have a holy people, not just an aggregate of holy individuals.”

Holiness of any kind is out of vogue in our culture, more a characteristic to be mocked than sought. In fact, our general culture seems so convinced that there is no such thing as holiness, that any claim to holiness usually results in immediate derision. We hear the word most often in reference to those who are “holier than thou,” by which we mean something like “judgmental,” “hypocritical,” or “Pharisaical.”

This text come out of the holiness tradition, however, where holiness is still valued. Through broader in its influences than John Wesley, the valuing of holiness is one necessity of being faithful to him and the tradition stemming from his life and work. The one who claims to be Wesleyan yet rejects holiness is an odd creature indeed.

So this text is committed to holiness. The holiness sought, as we see in this quote is not just the holiness of the individual (perhaps that which is most prone to mockery?) but also of the church.

What I wonder is whether it’s correct to say that “holiness begins with the individual. When I consider my own quest for holiness I become dubious of this claim. I didn’t know that there was such a thing as holiness until I came to faith in Christ in the context of the church, and submitted myself to its practices and disciplines. That community and those practices and disciplines come before me; as a believer, as a potentially holy person, they are prior to any holiness of my own.

Wesleyans make a primary connection between holiness and love. We talk about “holy love.” We talk about the pinnacle of holiness as “being made perfect in love.” Clearly in this context, and in the context of Jesus’ Great Commandment (“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind & strength, and love your neighbor as yourself”) there is something I do as an individual. I am called to love God and the people around me. If this action of loving causes, expresses, or instantiates my holiness, then even if it is something I do, I doubt it is adequate to say that my holiness begins with me.

Turning to the communal, I’m also uncomfortable saying that the holiness of the church, the Body of Christ, derives primarily from my holiness – or, to use Aukerman’s phrase, from “the aggregate of holy individuals,” one of which I potentially am. Rather, I would argue that the holiness of the Body is dependent on the holiness of Christ, and that my holiness is dependent on the holiness of the Body and my life in Christ.

I’m not sure Aukerman would argue with any of this; he’d probably tell me I’m nitpicking. My concern is that as a text in Christian Education, the claim that “holiness begins with the individual” is rooted in the practical claim that our job as Christian educators is to help individuals become/be holy. Yes, doubtless. But is there any sense in which our job is not directed at individuals but at the church as a whole, that our work of leadership is aiming to make the Body as a whole holy? While some of this might come about through a focus on individuals, I’m not convinced that the whole truth lies there. We need to discover more ways to educate the Body as the Body, as a whole, and not just hope that through our work with individuals the aggregate turns out ok.

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The Problem of Sustained Personal Identity

Posted on June 13, 2013 by Richard Heyduck

In a recent essay a the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company) Religion site, Stanley Hauerwas raises the issue of the sustaining of personal identity over time.

It is by no means clear to me that I am the same person who wrote Hannah’s Child. Although philosophically I have a stronger sense of personal identity than Daniel Dennett, who after having given a lecture to a department of philosophy on personal identity, was not given his honorarium. The department refused to give him his honorarium because, given Dennett’s arguments about personal identity, or lack thereof, the department was not confident that the person who had delivered the lecture would be the same person who would receive the honorarium.

A perennial issue in Buddhism, highlighted during the Enlightenment by David Hume, and recently revived by Galen Strawson, this is an important philosophical question. Am I the same person that I was yesterday? Last year? A minute ago? How would I go about demonstrating this?

Buddhism is happy to say that personal identity is an illusion, and a bad idea at that. We’re much better recognizing the deception of these bundles of perception and let it all go. The sooner we drop the attachment to the idea of the “I,” that my continued existence matters and is real, the better off we’ll be (though how I will be better off with no I, I don’t get. It’s probably a sign of my failure to understand Buddhism.).

My answer to this problem is Hauerwasian, though not raised in this essay. It fits with what he’s written elsewhere, at least tangentially. If I knew his work better I could tell you if and where is appeared explicitly.

Two features give us reason to accept out continued identity through time, both missed if we give in to the modern tendencies to solipsism. First, the fact that my identity is narratively constituted. I am I, not merely through the timeless possession of a set of attributes. I am my history.

Second, I am who I am as known by others. I am always in a network of relationships with others. Others know me before I am even aware of myself. I am known before I know.

A consequence of these features is that although I have a sustained identity to the extent that might life is a single story (even if chaotic and sometimes fragmentary) and that I am known by others in the course of the intersection of my story and theirs, my identity is not static. I am not, never have been, and never will, standing still. I am in flux. But I am in flux.

A second consequence is that it is not possible for me to entirely know myself. My story, while it is mine, is always entangled with other stories. Even if I know the entirety of my own story (which I doubt), I do not ever know the entirety of those other stories. Also, since my identity is partially constituted by my being known, and the ones who know me are themselves in flux, my access to their knowing of me is limited. I can know more, I can know less, I can never know all. I always necessarily am partially opaque to myself.

A final consequence I’ll mention ties in to Aristotle’s theory of evaluating happiness. Since it is temporally constituted, my identity is not something that is whole and entire at any particular time. I exist through time; I am a temporal being. My identity must then be understood temporally, and evaluated temporally.

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Definition-phobia

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Richard Heyduck

In a recent post Tony Morgan writes about reasons churches lack a strategy for life change. The first of his four reasons is that churches don’t define success, fearing the accountability that will come with it.

I ran first ran into this difficulty almost twenty years ago. I was leading a small congregation at the time. The church was hidden in an older neighborhood, well off the roads that carried most the traffic. Though not an very old church, the church was old in attitude. They wanted to grow, they wanted to reach people. The problem was they only wanted people like them, and there weren’t enough of them to go around.

At the time I thought focusing on making disciples would be a good idea. Jesus commands it, after all, and there were plenty of potential disciples around. I thought that if we were going to make disciples, learning to be disciples might be a good starting point. I did a study with the church leadership about the nature of discipleship. We look at the characteristics of discipleship. I soon learned that I had a problem. They’d heard the word discipleship enough over the years that they just assumed everything they already did were acts of discipleship. “Move along, preacher, nothing to see here. No change needed.” So I pushed back, adding some teeth to the description, highlighting the differences between the biblical picture of discipleship and our current reality. You may guess that it was not well-received.

Tony’s right. Definition is scary. It can easily imply the need to change, to leave our comfort zones and current certainties. It’s easier to just assume we’re already doing everything we need to be doing. If the results aren’t coming along, well, the fault must lie elsewhere. But definition is also what gives us traction in our lives and organizations. “I want to go to Dallas” is a fairly specific goal, while still offering plenty of flexibility. The concept “Dallas,” a city, is clear enough that we can specify where it is in relation to where we now are. We can identify some methods to move ourselves from our current location to that location. We can specify ways to know when we’ve arrived.

What if instead of saying, “I want to go to Dallas,” we said, “I want to go somewhere.” “Somewhere is pretty vague.” Success comes easily, since anywhere we go will count as somewhere.

Definition in discipleship, in leading for life change, gives us the traction we need to get somewhere. Sure, it can be scary, especially if the distance between that defined goal and our current reality is large, and we lack obvious means of movement. But I’d rather settle for a clear and difficult goal that means something, than an easy and achievable goal that I’ve already met.

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Hanging with Jesus

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Richard Heyduck

Mark 2:13-17 is a short passage with two connected stories. In the first story Jesus is out by the lake. The crowds come so he begins teaching them. No classroom is depicted, no “sit down and do your lesson,” for Jesus. Jesus takes them on a walk, right up to the tax collector’s booth. What a great place for a lesson! Come on Jesus, tell us how evil this collaborator is! Tell us how you’re going to lead us to stand up against Rome and these hired leeches!

Levi’s sitting there doing his job. He is a collaborator. He is working for the occupiers. He’d make a great object lesson. But Jesus doesn’t treat him like an object. Jesus treats him like a person. “Levi! Come follow me!” And Levi gets up and follows Jesus. There’s no sign that Levi knew what was in store for him, what his future held. He just got up and followed Jesus.

Since we see in the next part of the text that Jesus was partying at his house, Levi must have felt pretty safe with Jesus. Levi felt so safe, in fact, that he invited all his friends – his fellow sinners. Again, there’s no sign of what they made of partying with Jesus, but they seemed to do it with abandon.

Not everyone was excited about Jesus’ lesson plan for the day. The Pharisees, neither invited to the party nor interested in being invited, stood on the outskirts and looked in. They knew what was happening. This messianic pretender Jesus was giving the lie to his claims of holiness and God-chosennes. The disciples, likely confused about Jesus’ actions, were hanging on the edges also. They loved Jesus, but weren’t too sure about the riff raff he was attracting. Seeing the bewildered disciples, the Pharisees drive in the wedge: “How come your master is eating with those people, those sinners?” I bet the disciples were wondering that themselves. We don’t know which one it was, but one of them finally worked up the courage to approach Jesus. “Uh, teacher, why are we here? What are we doing with these sinners?” Jesus had a ready answer. “Those who are well don’t need a physician, but the sick do. I didn’t come to call the righteous but the sinners.”

I notice here that Jesus hasn’t done anything distinctively or exclusively religious. He’s asked someone to follow him. He’s accepted an invitation to dinner. He’s spending time with people.

I also notice that when the disciples hung out with Jesus they found themselves in questionable company and questionable situations.

I’m praying for the ability of folks in our churches to see people – the Levi’s and their friends – the way Jesus did; to take the time to get on their turf; to build friendships so outsiders feel safe. I’m praying for us to get out of our buildings and go to the people, wherever they might be. I’m praying for us to get involved in more questionable situations with more questionable company.

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Morale

Posted on June 2, 2013 by Richard Heyduck

At the meeting of the Texas Annual Conference this past week and on Facebook in the days following the meeting, I’ve heard a lot about clergy morale. Some think it’s gotten pretty low, while others think it’s about where it’s always been (in their experience). I don’t have a broad enough view to say anything determinate about how morale is now, but I have given some thought to the general subject.

1. If morale means something like “feeling good about yourself and your current setting (geographical & social)” then I’d rather have good morale than not. If I am in a truly bad situation, or am missing out on God’s best for me through my own actions than good morale would not be very helpful. Morale from this perspective, then, can be like pain. Pain tells us we’re in trouble and need to do something. If we feel no pain when our bodies are being damaged or destroyed, we’re worse off than if we do and can respond in some way. If I’m doing the wrong thing and experiencing negative consequences that dampen my morale, then the thing I need most is to start doing the right thing, not directly try to fix my morale.

2. In a related sense, there are at least some times when we are responsible for our morale. One of the things we ask each other is “Are you happy with X?” We’re infatuated with happiness, too much so, I think. Now, I confess that I like being happy. But many times in life my happiness is simply irrelevant, making the question, “Are you happy with X” the wrong question. Am I obeying God? Am I loving God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength? Am I loving my neighbor as myself? These are good questions. Doing these things may make me happy, may make me unhappy. My guess is that often doing these things may only lead to happiness down the road, not necessarily here and now. So do we want good morale? Then the best thing we can do is do the right things and watch our attitude.

3. But we are not entirely responsible for our morale. Sometimes we do everything we know to do and still feel kicked and beaten. I’ve felt that way before so I certainly don’t think it’s something only other people suffer. I don’t know what to do about my poor morale in this kid of situation, so I take another track. Rather than focusing on my own poor morale (when it happens), what I do is try to build the morale of the people around me. In other words, I act as an encourager. I have limited control over my situation in life. I have no control over what other people do, either to themselves or to others. Having control over my own actions, however, I can exert myself to build others up, to do what is in my power to make their situations better, to extend blessings to them. Again, my power is limited. I can rarely do everything I would like for people. But I can do something.

I’m sure I’ve just barely begun to scratch the surface here. But for me, the first question is not, What’s my morale? Rather, the question for me is, “What are you doing with what you have to raise the morale of others?”

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Epic Win!

Posted on May 28, 2013 by Richard Heyduck

Kenda Creasy Dean is our guest speaker at the Texas Annual Conference this week. Having read her books, I knew where she’d be coming from. If you have the least interest in youth ministry or leading a church that disciples young people effectively, read her Practicing Passion and Almost Christian. The latter, which provides material for her presentations this week, is a strategic attack on what Christian Smith has called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.

Dean began her presentation talking about video gamers. Gamers look for an “epic win.” Pursuing that win in the context of their game is totally engrossing. Wouldn’t it be great if we in the church could help people achieve an epic win with Christ?

Sure it would! But here’s the challenge, a challenge she only hit tangentially when she contrasted the Apostles’ Creed with the five beliefs of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Video games provide a story. Some stories are pretty minimal, some exquisitely detailed. In the game you are a player, an actor in that story. Your epic win is defined in terms of the narrative within the game.

Inasmuch as our churches are infected with Moralistic Therapeutic Deism – or other forms of dehistoricized, denarrativized faith – we will lack the kind of shared narrative in which an epic win makes sense. We are too much in thrall of voluntaristic individualism. There may be a Win for me, or a Win for you, but (like some postmoderns) we’ve rejected the metanarratives (the stories that are bigger than we are) in which epic wins are possible.

If we’re going to help people experience an epic win in Christ, the Gospel is the perfect context. But until we recover a sense of the Gospel story as a shared narrative, the ongoing story of God in which we are all participants, that epic win will be hard to come by.

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