The Church as Movement

Starting and Sustaining Missional-Incarnational Communities

JR Woodward, Dan White Jr.

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780830841332
• eBook ISBN: 9780830893621
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

IVP Readers' Choice Award
Missio Alliance Essential Reading List

Public gatherings are vital for movement, but too often in our approach to planting churches, we haven't paid enough attention to the difficult grassroots work of movement: discipleship, community formation, and mission. This book will help you start missional-incarnational communities in a way that reflects the viral movement of the early New Testament church.

JR Woodward (author of Creating a Missional Culture) and Dan White Jr. (author of Subterranean) have trained church planters all over North America to create movemental churches that are rooted in the neighborhood, based on eight necessary competencies:

• Movement Intelligence
• Polycentric Leadership
• Being Disciples
• Making Disciples
• Missional Theology
• Ecclesial Architecture
• Community Formation
• Incarnational Practices

The book features an interactive format with tools, exercises, and reflection questions and activities. It's ideal for church planting teams or discipleship groups to use together.

It's not enough to understand why the church needs more missional and incarnational congregations. The Church as Movement will also show you how to make disciples that make disciples. This is the engine that drives the church as movement, so that everyday Christians can be present in the world to join God's mission in the way of Jesus.

Part 1

//DISTRIBUTING

1

Movement Intelligence

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The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.

Jesus Christ, Matthew 13:31-32

Movement occurs when we answer our call to live in communion with God, and out of the overflow of our life with him, we live into our sentness as a community, carrying out his co-mission to be a sign, foretaste and instrument of his kingdom in ever-expanding geographical areas (Acts 1:1). Movement occurs when the making of mission-shaped disciples—who live in the world for the sake of the world, in the way of Christ—goes viral. Movement is about developing structures and systems that catapult people into mission, where reproducing discipleship groups, missional communities, churches and networks of churches is a natural part of its DNA. It’s the ripple effect: throwing a rock into a pond creates one ripple and then another and another, till ripples cover the whole pond.

Connecting to Movement

Jesus’ metaphors and parables of the kingdom describe the nature of movement. It starts small and becomes significant over time. It starts with a mustard seed and ends with a tree. In our current culture we mock and are unimpressed with the small. We’d rather have fast, furious, fantastic growth. Yet we must pay attention to the small if we want to recover our movemental beginnings. It’s within the small that disciples are formed and are sent into neighborhoods for the sake of God’s mission. Within the small, communities learn to gather under the essentials of being the church. We need to water the small, over and over, and allow God to bring fruitfulness. The power of movement is in the power of God’s Spirit blowing on the smallest embers.

1.1 Gaining New Eyes to See

It takes me (Dan) a while to buy something new. I often push things I own to the brink of being unusable before I use my hard-earned cash to replace them. I’d like to think it’s because I’m not materialistic, but it might be because I’m cheap. This recently happened with my glasses. I’ve been wearing the same glasses for a few years and have been complaining about them for a while, but I’ve refused to get new ones.

Everything seemed foggy and unclear. These glasses became so bad that driving at night was probably not wise. Eventually I surrendered and got a new pair. I remember the first time I put them on; it was as if someone gave me new eyeballs. I could see! The coating on my previous lenses had eroded so much and had accumulated so many scratches that the world looked different. My new lenses gave me a different, clearer perspective.

We all have a set of glasses that affect the way we see the world. Each of us has preconceived notions of what church means. To awaken and embrace the dormant movemental impulse of the church we must explore and evaluate the inherited way that we see the church.

All Christians have been given the same co-mission from Jesus, to go and make disciples of all the nations. Yet over time, the co-mission has gotten fuzzy. When our vision has been clear, we see the church as movement. This has produced bright moments in our history. The Devotio Moderna movement, which produced The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, is an example. The Franciscans, the Anabaptists, the Moravians, the Wesleyans and the Pentecostal movements are other examples. But when our vision gets fuzzy, we distort the way we understand the Great Commission and how we see the church.

Where did the primary lens come from that dominates our vision of the church in the United States?

The church as industrial complex. In a farewell address to the nation in 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower gave a speech that became famous because it used the expression “military-industrial complex.”1 In it, Eisenhower warned of the growing danger of our nation stockpiling weapons, expanding its investment in defense spending and increasing the size of our government. This term, military-industrial complex, was coined to explain the excessive push to weaponize our country to ensure its security and safety. Eisenhower viewed our relationship with the military as increasingly unhealthy. Over the years, the military was demanding more money, was taking our best people and was becoming dominant in the public consciousness. It was consolidating and consuming all our resources.

Authors Skye Jethani and Scott Bessenecker have borrowed Eisenhower’s terminology to describe the current cultural lens by which we see the church, calling it the “Christian-industrial complex.”2 The Christian-industrial complex is a mindset and way of thinking about the church. There is an unquestioned, undergirding concept of the church that is highly informed by the United States’ ideas of success.

In our American imagination success means growing bigger, collecting more resources, consolidating power, creating strong hierarchical structures and growing rapidly. These are the most obvious, simplistic cultural signs of success. The same is true of the church, whether we serve in small or big churches. American church leaders’ imaginations and metrics for success are increasingly shaped by the things they can count. But, as Albert Einstein said, “That which counts is often the most difficult to count.”

We need a new lens through which to view the church if we want to live into the reality of the church as movement. The church-industrial complex has become the dominant lens for the church. Today, many churches believe their survival and success depends on collecting and consolidating more resources, programs, paid staff, property and people in attendance.

Figure 1.1. Church as industrial complex

A natural impulse for an organism is to collect resources into its own center of gravity. This is especially true for the church in the United States because of its large-scale rejection in society. The church as industrial complex unintentionally turns spirituality into a product, church growth into a race, leadership into a business and members into consumers. Through this lens, more is better.

For the church to become a movement again we need to see differently, and heed God’s caution: “The LORD does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart” (1 Sam 16:7). God compels us to look further than the cultural signs of visible church success.

In seeing the church as movement rather than the church as industrial complex, we must allow ourselves to be interrupted. At one point Jesus performs an odd two-stage miracle. Jesus spits in some dirt, makes mud and puts it on a blind man’s eyes—“ ‘I see people; they look like trees walking around.’ Once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly” (Mk 8:24-25). At first the man’s vision was hazy. Only when Jesus touches him a second time can he see clearly. What is going on here? Was Jesus losing his power? Obviously not.

Earlier in the same chapter, Jesus had warned his disciples to beware the yeast of the Pharisees (Mk 8:15). Yeast is necessary for baking bread, but in this case it refers to the bankrupt teaching of the Pharisees. The disciples wondered why Jesus was talking about bread. Jesus was upset and responded, “Do you have eyes but fail to see?” (Mk 8:18).

Jesus is genuinely aghast that his disciples have spent so much time with him but are still blind to his ways. Jesus is making a statement with the healing—even though we may have encountered Christ, we still are nearsighted to some degree or another. Our own experiences and knowledge smudges our vision.

We are like the blind man who now can see, but only partially. We must recognize our vision for being the church as movement is clouded by the church as industrial complex, which has led to the static state of the church today.

The static state of the church. We’re in a predicament. While the church in some places in the world is thriving, the church as a whole in the West (especially the Euro-tribal denominations) is increasingly viewed as irrelevant to the pursuit of spirituality and life transformation.3 We are swimming in resources, ministry real estate and fast-growing churches, but little of this seems to resonate within the wider culture.

Are people still going to Sunday worship services? Of course. But here’s a challenge: Ask the people of your city their thoughts on church. You will need thick skin because the responses will be disheartening. It is estimated that only 3.5 percent of my (Dan’s) city attend church on a regular basis. We’re a minority—not an oppressed minority, but a largely irrelevant minority. Not every city is as dechurched as mine, but this is a growing reality. A sizable chunk of every city’s inhabitants have experienced the church and found it unhelpful for being a whole and healthy person. We believe the way of Jesus is the ultimate road to wholeness and healing, but somehow that isn’t the word on the street when it comes to the reputation of the church.

We have few options in the face of this reality. The first is denial. Denial uses excuses to justify that all is good. This is certainly an option, but denial is more painful than dealing with the writing on the wall. Missiologist David Bosch says, “The Church is always in a state of crisis and . . . its greatest shortcoming is that it is only occasionally aware of it.”4

The second option is to give up and take a long break on the organization of the church. We have probably all had moments when we have wondered if it was worth the energy. Still, the resurrection of Jesus inaugurates a breathtaking vision of Jesus’ own words, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against the kingdom of God, and the boundaries between heaven and earth are being removed”(Mt 16:18 The Kingdom New Testament).

There’s something tectonic about this; it rattles our bones every time we wonder about the future of the church. Rather than letting the predicament we’re facing in the West call us into quitting, it compels us into faithfulness. Encountering this crisis raises the possibility of truly being the movemental church. The problem is big, but the kingdom of God is much bigger. Our cultural irrelevance is an opportunity to recognize that it’s time to get a new set of glasses.

There is somethi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword by Alan Hirsch
• Introduction
• Part 1: Distributing
• Part 2: Discipling
• Part 3: Designing
• Part 4: Doing
• Epilogue: Living in Light of God’s Future
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Recommended Reading
• About the Authors
• V3 Movement
• Praxis Gathering
• Missio Alliance
• More from JR Woodward
• Praise for The Church as Movement
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright