Matt Smay

Since my last post – there’s been a ton of developments. Hugh, Ryan, and I had a great trip to Scotland and Ireland. We met some great people (Furgis, Phil Kingsley, and many others from Greater European Mission).  We enjoyed a great time with church leaders and even spent a day golfing at St. Andrews.

It’s still quite amazing to be in contexts where less than 3% of the population attends an evangelical church.  It’s a reminder of how important the call has become to the missional/incarnational life in the west.

On a positive note, everywhere we went, we talked about the need to create resources for those in the existing church to reorient people back to the missional way of God.  The problem in the past has been that we have separated the idea of spiritual formation from missional practices.  It’s time to redefine discipleship as “becoming like Jesus” and call people deep spiritual formation on the streets.

Hugh and I have been working to create such a resource.  I’m happy to announce that The TK Primer is now available – released in April. We’re super excited about this resource and are getting great feedback from those pioneering the Primer in their churches. The goal of the Primer is to help every Christian to understand and experience a bit of what’s possible in an incarnational community.

The Primer is a spiritual formation journal that walks someone through an 8 week process to deal with the barriers to real apprenticeship. That is Individualism, Consumerism, and Materialism.  This is an individual process, but the fifth day of each week is designed to be done with a group – a few friends, a small group, or a community group that’s just getting started.

Each week has 7 days of content and follows this format -

Day one: Exploration of the concept

Day two: Meditation on Scripture related to the concept

Day three: Change element: What will need to change to live out the concept

Day Four: Action day: Small steps into missional life

Day Five: Community Day: Where everyone processes their personal journey together

Day Six: Calibration Day: Serious reorientation to the new habit

Day Seven: Sabbath Communion

The primer can be used with existing small groups to move them beyond “bible study” to a more holistic incarnational commmunty.  In adullam, we use this 8 weeks to prepare people to live the Adullam way and so it serves as a great companion to any assimilation process, disipleship process, membership curriculum, or small group training.

You can only find it on our Tangible Kingdom website. There, you’ll also find a basic video that will help you use the primer.

If you’re an existing pastor and desire to use this tool to reorient your church, we’d recommend you check out the Missional Chuch Apprenticeship Practicum. The MCAP is specifically design to give you an effective grid to work from using the Primer. You can find out about the MCAP at the Missio web site.

Last week, Hugh and I had a chance to spend a few days with a couple of friends, colleagues, and strategic missional leaders. Alan Hirsch – on the front right is one of the founders of Forge Australia and an author of three of my most highly recommended books (the newest of which is ReJesus). Lance Ford in the left corner is a church planter and coach that has started an entire online networking and training website called Shapevine.

During our time together, we solidified our commitment to serve in the development of a broad based missional movement, which will result in a number of partnering arrangements with Missio – the details of which will be announced in the next few weeks.

I’ve had several conversations lately with leaders in declining churches that outline a similar story. As with many things in life, churches don’t tend to end or collapse overnight – there’s often a steady and gradual process. We can learn a few things from these common stories:

• Church leaders often look in the wrong places for help. I consistently hear of church leaders that start looking to mega-churches for programs that might help ease their decline, or even create new growth. I have nothing against mega-church programs, but often small churches try to implement one aspect (maybe the curriculum) of a mega-church program without considering the enormous infrastructure that accompanies these programs (staffing, advertising, buildings, marketing, budget, atmosphere, etc…). And there’s one very important distinction between mega-churches and most others – people are still visiting mega-churches in droves, which is not common for smaller, community based churches. Therefore, church leaders should consider looking to the successes of churches that are similar in size, staffing, and most importantly – have overcome similar challenges. For example, doubling a church 2x’s over from 75 to 300 is entirely different than multiplying from 1000 to 4000.
• Usually the decline of a church takes years – even decades. In this period of slow decline, church leaders often hold onto the wrong staff and programs, which further entrenches the church. For example, it might be tempting to hire a new worship leader, keep a long-time staff position, or hold onto the youth pastor (overseeing a small number of teens), but this often comes at the expense of other staff (especially children’s ministry staff). Once a church loses it’s young families, it’s almost impossible to get them back. Since there’s typically a natural affinity or homogeneity between people, in which like tends to attract like, the more young families in a church, the better the odds that the relationships among those families will create a natural momentum and gravity. Therefore, it’s important to always be investing vital resources towards future generations to help keep a church young – thereby, avoiding the loss of an entire generation (a common sign of a church in decline).
• Most church growth happens relationally, even if it’s supplemented by programs. A declining church in most instances loses it’s relational touch with the outside world. In periods of church growth there’s usually something in a church’s DNA that directly links the people of church with people in culture. This is why there are programs out there that can help facilitate church growth – when the programs serve to bring added value to commonly occurring relationships. Some examples are day-cares, food and clothes banks, schools, sport teams, festivals, camps, small groups, etc…
• Not appropriately balancing risk is a common theme among declining churches. Whether a church takes on too much debt to expand the building, or fails to risk at strategic moments can signal the beginning of the end for a church. Maintaining the status quo or simply surviving is not a very inspiring value. The average church attender is often looking for something bigger than themselves to participate in, and a church with a vision for it’s future and a viable mission is invaluable.

We’ve recently had some questions from people that have confused our use of the term “emerging” with the specific group referred to as “Emergent or Emergent Village.” Our friend and colleague, Alan Hirsch has also run into the same conversations due to his influence and leadership within the much larger conversation related to ‘emerging missional movements,’ which many organizations are now participating. In doing a little online research, it was easy to find heated debates – I even found an article on Wikipedia with the title “Emerging vs. Emergent.” Our CRM pres. Sam Metcalf, responded to one of our critiques with the following clarification – (Thanks Sam)

Regarding the “emerging church” and CRM’s relationship to this renewal movement, I believe it is important to understand that this movement is not monolithic. It is very diverse. It should also not be confused with “Emergent” which is a specific organization here in the U.S. but which does not, however, represent the totality of “emerging churches” by any means. The emerging church movement as a whole reflects a variety of theological perspectives, some of which I would agree with and some that would give me pause. But overall, I personally believe this is a movement of God which stands squarely in the flow of the great, historical renewal movements of the past 2000 years.

As in almost all renewal movements throughout the history of Christianity, it’s messy. That’s to be expected. There are always excesses, muddy thinking, and some level of deconstructionism that takes place when such change occurs. That was even true of the Protestant Reformation. I saw it myself in the Jesus Movement of the sixties and seventies in the U.S. and astute observers see many interesting similarities to today’s situation. Regardless, CRM is committed to serve the emerging church and to help in any way possible to develop and empower the leadership of this movement.

What God is undoubtedly doing is raising up, on the cultural fringes, a new generation of people who are faithfully and wholeheartedly followers of Jesus and true to the bible, but they are committed to living that faith out in an increasingly secular, postmodern world. From my experience, what I believe is most unsettling to the traditional Christian establishment is not primarily the theological nuances and questions that emanate from emerging churches, but forms and ecclesiological expressions that are outside the acceptable box. While some would attack the emerging church on theological grounds, my suspicion is the real backlash is primarily cultural. In most respects, the emerging church movement is profoundly biblical…

I hope sharing posts on emerging church will continue to clarify some of the issues surrounding this controversial topic. I remember attending the Young Leader Network events in the mid 90’s, and I’ve personally seen some negative aspects of the emerging movement, especially early on when it was highly deconstructive in nature. I appreciate the contribution of the many voices that are articulating proactive principles that are being implemented throughout the western world. I have even greater hope now, than in those early days, that the Christocentric and Missiological framework will solidify the core of this emerging (missional) movement in the days ahead.