Community Is Messy

The Perils and Promise of Small Group Ministry

Heather Zempel

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780830837885
• eBook ISBN: 9780830866977
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Heather Zempel oversees the community life at a multisite church in Washington, D.C., a challenging population with one of the highest relocation rates in the United States. And yet under her leadership, National Community Church has become a model for creative, dynamic, deep small group ministry.Drawing from her background as an environmental engineer (including such bizarre experiences as monitoring a pig lagoon and the unintended slaughter of a hundred innocent fish), Heather Zempel assesses the perils and possibilities inherent in small groups and other environments for Christian community. The book helps leaders begin to see the inherent "mess" of such gatherings as raw material for arriving at something beautiful. Read this book and discover fresh insights into how we can support one another's unique paths to maturity in Christ while maintaining cohesion as a community and blessing the world around us.

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Community Is Messy

Anything you build on a large scale or with intense passion invites chaos.

Francis Ford Coppola

Community is great. Once upon a time, we small group leaders heard a pastor give a stirring message on the theological, ecclesiological and practical importance of life in community, and we left with a newfound conviction that we needed to get involved. An announcement was made from the pulpit about the need for new small group leaders, so we decided to put our convictions into practice because we were convinced both spiritually and experientially that small groups are great. We courageously attended leadership training classes and left with a passion to change the world through the greatness of small groups. The church promoted our small group in print, in words and in pictures, and we approached the night of our first meeting with holy anticipation. Because small groups are great.

And then the people showed up.

Community is great until you actually experience it. It might not happen on the first night, in the first month or even in the first year, but at some point, our well-tended community falls apart. The chairs are set, the snacks are ready, the lesson is prepared, the service project is planned, and you’re doing everything you need to do as a leader. Then, all of a sudden, you realize there were some things no one ever told you about leading small groups. The nice thoughts about growth and friends and transparency and community tricked you into leadership, but there were a few things that went unmentioned in leadership training. You have just discovered that community is messy.

Community is messy because it always involves people, and people are messy. It’s about people hauling their brokenness and baggage into your house and dumping it in your living room.

What do you do at that moment? The moment you realize that the people you’ve committed your life to are messy becomes the defining moment of your leadership.

Biblical Mess

We have a long and notoriously messy history as the people of God. Let’s go all the way back to the beginning. God created, and everything was good, but we didn’t last three chapters before we messed it up. Eve disobeyed God, encouraged Adam to join in the mess, and sin mess happened. Fingers got pointed, and relational mess happened. The inevitable results of sin were pronounced, and life mess ensued.

The story continues to the next generation with Cain and Abel. I would say jealousy and murder amount to mess. Noah built a huge boat to house representatives from every species. I can’t imagine that was the cleanest environment. Afterward, this great and noble hero of the faith got himself drunk, and his sons discovered him naked. Mess.

Then there was Abraham claiming that his wife was not his wife and navigating water resources rights with his nephew as their herdsmen fought over the best plots of land. We find Isaac and Rebekah playing favorites with their sons Jacob and Esau, which produced generations-long sibling rivalry. The story continues with Jacob showing favoritism to his son Joseph, which resulted in a family meltdown.

Fast-forward a few hundred years to Moses. I like to think of Moses as the first small group leader in the Bible. You thought your group was rough? Look at the people he was charged with leading. They couldn’t follow instructions, complained incessantly and forgot the miracles they had seen in a matter of hours. While the Egyptians were plagued with lice and locusts, the Hebrews were plagued with attention deficit disorder.

Fast-forward a bit more to David. He was the second great small-group leader in the Bible. In 1 Samuel 22, we read that David was running for his life and decided to hide out in the cave of Adullam, where he was soon joined by his family. Maybe that was comforting to him, but I’m sure there are at least a few members of some families who wouldn’t necessarily be the most comforting allies. Then, Scripture tells us, more reinforcements arrived as he was joined by men who were in trouble, in debt or just discontented. Great. Those are exactly the kind of people I want to show up to help me in my distress. How many of us feel like that’s our small group? David’s experience with messy relationships didn’t end there; it was only the beginning. David and Saul, David and Uriah, David and Bathsheba, David and the prophet Nathan, David and his son Absalom. Okay, pretty much David and everyone.

Keep moving to the New Testament. Jesus was born in the mess of a stable—most likely a cave where animals were kept and fed—and placed in a stone feeding trough for animals. When he grew up, he called twelve men to follow him— fishermen, tax collectors, political revolutionaries—who bickered over who was going to be greatest in the kingdom.

In Acts 15, the apostles had to meet in Jerusalem to sort out a theological mess. Paul and Peter bickered, Paul and John Mark parted ways, and Paul and James disagreed on the interaction between faith and works. In fact, the majority of writings in the New Testament exist because the early church was messy. Let’s consider the church at Corinth as a case study: incestuous affairs, lawsuits, divorce and separation, idol worship, big egos, doctrinal infighting, sexual promiscuity and people getting drunk while celebrating Communion. You know you’ve got a problem in your church when people are getting drunk on Communion. I feel obligated to point out that this obviously happened before we started using the plastic shot glasses of grape juice.

And you thought your small group was messed up.

Standing in Cathedrals in Conflict

As we step further into the pages of church history, we find even more mess. Our history as the people of God is riddled with inconsistencies, heresies, hypocrisies and general stupidity. We launched inquisitions, crusades and systematic killings in the name of Christ. Peter and Paul, who lectured those who were healed under their ministry to worship Jesus alone, are now venerated by some to the point that they may once again be confused for deity.

I recently went on a pilgrimage following the footsteps of Paul in Greece and Italy, and I was reminded once again of our cluttered history as the people of God. There were many significant experiences, but one in particular reminded me of the mess of our story as the church. Standing in St. Peter’s Basilica was a holy moment. Everything about the architecture and the art pointed me to Christ and gave me a window into the awe and wonder and majesty of God Almighty. It made me appreciate my connection to the thousands and thousands who came before me. I felt a sense of community with the saints and martyrs to whom I’m connected in the family of God. My stomach was in my throat.

Then something was triggered in the recesses of my Protestant brain—an incessant banging as on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. I remembered that the construction of this magnificent basilica was facilitated in part by the sale of indulgences. My stomach turned. Tension. Conflict. Was this a moment when I was supposed to be enraptured by the glory of God? Or disgusted by the way his gospel had been perverted by people? Was this an opportunity to worship? Or an opportunity to walk out in protest?

While standing in cathedrals in conflict, I settled somewhere in the uncomfortable but inevitable land of the in-between and thanked God for his grace and sovereignty. I think that’s what it boils down to. God is full of grace. God is sovereign. So even though we’ve been stupid along the way, his story moves forward and he builds his church through the mess.

The reality is that we’re still constructing cultural hurdles to hold people at a distance and make it difficult for them to come into the presence of God. We still sell salvation; we just frame it differently—like promises of blessing in exchange for a donation to a televangelist. To be sure, future generations will look quizzically at our ecclesiology and wonder how the truth was ever able to prevail underneath the layers of bizarre faith practices.

But that’s the beauty of our faith. It isn’t up to us. It’s all about God, his grace and his sovereignty. As we read stories from the pages of Scripture and the pens of the saints, we see the hand of God writing his own story in them and through them. Emerging from the mess is the fingerprint of God writing the hope of the gospel and the story of redemption.

The scary news? Community is messy. It always has been and always will be. Messy community is not the exception to the rule; it’s the rule. The good news is that mess, when engaged rightly, can be the very thing that brings what we most want in groups: community and growth.

Proverbs 14:4 has become one of my organizing metaphors in regard to community, church, small groups or whatever circles of mess we find ourselves in: “Where there are no oxen, the manger is empty, but from the strength of an ox come abundant harvests.”

You can have a clean barn with no animals in it, but you aren’t going to get much done without animals. Likewise, you can have a tidy church as long as no one is in it, but community requires that we show up. And showing up means bringing our mess.

Pig Lagoons

I learned an important lesson at a pig farm about dealing with mess. When I was a graduate student in the biological engineering department at Louisiana State University, I took a class called Bioreactor Design. You know, the standard preparatory path to ministry. Anyway, bioreactors are used to grow cells and tissues; they’re systems that transform raw materials into useful products. The class focused on understanding the variables and catalysts of the reactions that transformed raw inputs into productive outputs—like turning chemicals into medicines and wastewater into wetlands. It was about designing a system in which transformation was catalyzed.

Toward the end of the semester, each of us was required to participate in a research project. While most of my classmates were designing systems that allowed them to work with snazzy laboratory equipment or were studying reaction kinetics for cranking out pharmaceuticals, I was sloshing through the mud and poop of Ben Hur Research Farm every day to take samples from the treatment lagoon at the pig feeding operation. And when I say poop, I mean literal poop; that’s not a metaphor for mess.

Here’s the deal. Pig farms stink. I mean, they stink really badly. In Louisiana, there were laws that regulated how bad the stink could be. Imagine a day in mid-July when the thermometer reads ninety-five and the humidity is 195 percent. On a day like that, you just don’t want the stink to be any worse than it has to be. Most of the farmers dealt with the poop by washing down the animal pens and discharging all the sludge to a treatment lagoon, and my goal was to reduce the stink. That required me to determine the kinetic parameters for the reactions in the lagoon that broke down the waste and converted it into useful product—fertilizer—and to come up with new lagoon designs that maximized those reactions. Reducing the stink meant looking at the variables that most impacted the transformation and maximizing those in the design of the environment. Clear as sludge?

Basically all the pig poop gets washed into this lagoon . . . and I’ve got to make it less stinky. Here’s what I learned. On one hand, I couldn’t just turn a blind eye (or in this case, a clogged nostril) to the stink and pretend it didn’t exist. I couldn’t just wish it away or will it away. On the other hand, I couldn’t do anything directly about the stink. I couldn’t hover over the lagoon, raise my Moses staff and command the stink to be gone. There was no miracle formula I could drop into the lagoon to make the stink disappear. There was no way to attack the stink directly.

Instead I had to focus on creating an environment in which the stink was most effectively and efficiently converted into a useful and beneficial product. The point was not to focus on the stink but to focus on the environment—to design an environment that fostered change and maximized transformation. The title of my final report was “Determination of Kinetic Parameters of Swine Waste under Anoxic Conditions.” I barely even understand what that means anymore, but the point was transforming mess into something good.

In the church, the stink takes the form of sin, circumstances, conflict, personality differences, teenagers, deacons—the “whatever” we perceive to be inhibiting growth and community. Sometimes we try to ignore it, hoping that time and inertia will be our ally and one day the stink will no longer exist. Or we try to deal with the stink directly. We think if we point at it and say, “Stop!” firmly enough, it will go away. We hope that if we preach hard enough or pray loud enough the problem will die, and the stink will dissipate. The result is that mess might be ignored or hidden, but nothing changes. Neither ignoring the mess nor halfway dealing with it in a roundabout way brings lasting transformation.

In reality, we need to approach things like my bioreactor design class did: acknowledge that crap is a natural byproduct of life, and work to create environments that catalyze change.

Mess and Growth: There Is Always a Link

I’ve discovered the hard way, and I’m beginning to discover in a hopeful way, that mess and transformation are directly proportional. There’s always a link.

I live in a world where mess abounds. My church is about 60 percent single, and about 75 percent are in their twenties and thirties. Many of them work jobs that have political overtones or undertones. The three issues I find myself addressing more than...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Quote
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• First Things First
• 1 Community Is Messy
• 2 Everything Is an Experiment
• 3 Lead Yourself Well
• 4 Growing People
• 5 Discipleship Is Not Linear
• 6 Small Groups Should Happen in Real Life
• 7 Systems Are Made to Be Destroyed
• 8 Wear Out Your Welcome
• Navigating the Mess
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press