Street Crossers

Conversations with Simple Church Planters and Stories of Those Who Send Them

Rick W. Shrout

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781610973892
  9781498260435
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621893387
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Imagine traditional congregations in the United States and Canada sending missionaries across the street from their church buildings to express the kingdom of God within a postmodern culture and among disenfranchised Christians. The possibilities and potential are endless. This concept is explored and actual examples are presented in Street Crossers. Partnerships between traditional churches and nontraditional "simple church" planters are rare. More need to be encouraged because a significant number of people across North America are skeptical of organized religion or want nothing to do with church-as-usual. While some might conclude that the traditional church has little to offer a postmodern world and that no amount of tweaking traditional church structures will make a significant difference, they have forgotten to consider a vital reality existing in most congregations across the land: a commitment to send and support missionaries to "foreign" cultures. It's time to harness this existing commitment and focus it across the street.

1

Simply Put

Church-as-Usual Wasn’t Enough

Chris Marshall says he was “born into a church split” and describes himself as a “denominational mutt.” On his father’s side, his grandfather was the pastor of a large fundamentalist Baptist church in Philadelphia and surprisingly got involved in the charismatic movement in the 1970s. After his parents divorced, Chris was a “fundamentalist Baptist” three weeks a month while living with his mom, and a “charismatic” once a week when visiting his dad in a basement sanctuary where his grandfather was the pastor. Later in life, Chris found himself involved in ministry with other denominational expressions of the church. A denominational mutt is a very fitting self-description.

Chris remembers the church experiences with his grandfather as being positive. But after his grandfather died when Chris was in the fourth grade, his subsequent perceptions of Christianity were influenced by his mother through being exposed to a legalistic form of church life. As he grew older, Chris became disappointed by the hypocrisy he perceived in many professing Christians. But then came a turning point in his life. During his junior year in high school, a youth leader in Chris’s church began spending time with him and a mentoring relationship ensued. “It was a life-on-life relationship. He was the first guy I ever knew who actually did what he said he believed in,” Chris notes.

At the age of seventeen, Chris had another powerful experience. While driving his car on a rainy night, a feeling of love overwhelmed him—it was the presence of Jesus. A sudden flash of memories of Bible stories from his childhood flooded his mind. It was the moment when he first sensed a call to ministry. God was calling him to be an influence in the lives of others—the kind of influence he had longed for in his own life. He was convinced it was a calling to proclaim the gospel in a way that would have caught his attention had someone explained it to him in a relevant way.

Chris looks back and realizes that his confrontational approach to sharing his faith in high school was a byproduct of the kind of Christianity on which he had been weaned as a child. It was also a reflection of his “all-or-nothing” personality. Chris remembers:

I was pretty bold. I wore a lot of Christian t-shirts like, “Hell Ain’t Cool.” Our church youth group had a program [called] Evangelism Explosion and I would use that on strangers, forcing my agenda on them. I was just pretty vocal and brash about my Christianity, not afraid to stand alone in my beliefs. It was later in life that I realized a lot of that was more about me than about the people I claimed I wanted to reach.

As an example of his zeal, Chris wanted to be a missionary to a foreign country where he could actually be persecuted for his faith. Commitment to Christ meant having a willingness to suffer and pay any price. He contemplated quitting high school and forgoing college so he could move overseas as quickly as possible. But this kind of thinking began to subside after he met his wife-to-be, Nicki, who attended the same youth group. They soon found themselves thinking about attending the same college after high school—Trinity College in Deerfield, Illinois (known now as Trinity International University). Both of them were high school athletes and turned down athletic scholarships to bigger colleges because they both sensed a call to ministry. They married after their sophomore year at Trinity.

While attending Trinity College, Chris served as a youth pastor in two different churches in Chicago. The first position he took was with a Disciples of Christ church, a denomination he knew nothing about. He simply showed up because they had an opening. The second position was with a non-denominational church. Like many young hopeful ministers, he had both positive and negative experiences in ministry. Chris likes to say that he had a perfect idea for the church, but there was not one church in existence that could match up to his ideals at that point in his life.

After college, Chris and Nicki moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan, where he was a youth pastor for three years at a Reformed church in nearby Portage. It was an experience he thoroughly enjoyed. While living in the Chicago area, he had been exposed to the Willow Creek model of ministry, and tried to incorporate this into youth ministry in Michigan. What happened over the next three years was almost beyond imagination. A network of youth ministries emerged from youth pastors working together. From this fellowship an area gathering developed—Community Youth Worship. It was a worship service for students and led by students. In just one year the service averaged between 1,500 and 2,000 students in a single evening, filling the largest theaters in the area. In the process, Chris had become the coordinator for this network of youth ministries. Chris recalls:

It was kind of a heyday. We were experiencing this great stuff. But at the same time, inwardly, I was starting to die a little bit. All I can say is that when I was experiencing this success on the outside, inwardly I was dying, absolutely dying. I was just trying to perform, perform, perform! But something was really not clicking on the inside. . . . I think I completely lost track of my own relationship with God in the midst of the busyness and running the programs. The need to be creative and keep a busy schedule of activities left me spiritually, emotionally, and physically exhausted. But the spiritual exhaustion kept increasing which began to make me question everything I was doing. The ministry job seemed to be more about doing Christian industry rather than genuine ministry. I was running programs instead of doing life-on-life, which is how I am wired. Later, I realized as well that I had a kind of addiction to success. I needed it for my own personal worth and that’s what I was doing in ministry. But the successes were becoming less and less fulfilling. They wouldn’t satisfy. That’s when I realized I needed a change; I needed to re-visit these issues with God. You get accolades in ministry for being busy and exciting, but when it came down to it, I needed to slow down and re-connect with God to become whole again.

Some of his associates advised Chris that he should pursue a greater role in the church. But this was something he felt that he needed to consider with caution. Eventually, Chris and Nicki decided that the best thing to do was to get out of the way and leave. “I had burnt out in a couple of ways. I think I wanted to leave the ministry altogether. None of the churches had ever satisfied what I was looking for. I was chasing after something,” Chris notes. In time, he came to understand what he was chasing:

I realized I had gotten so depressed that I wanted to leave ministry, but I had developed a very high profile. So, I decided to go to seminary in order to leave the ministry, because I thought if I go to seminary, no one would ask me any questions. They’ll just assume I’m taking the next step or something. But actually it just bought me some time.

In 1998, Chris visited Denver Seminary to explore the possibility of attending school in Colorado. Not sure of the next step he should take, he spent a day walking in the snow in the Rocky Mountains asking God to show him what to do next. Nothing happened—no grand revelation.

But later that evening, while watching TV in his hotel room and feeling depressed that God had not answered his question, he watch a news report on a school shooting in Arkansas. Images of student victims filled the screen gripping his attention:

Something just struck me as I was sitting in my hotel room. We were really missing the boat on this. Everything I was doing in church wasn’t affecting that world at all. We weren’t permeating culture, and we weren’t touching that stuff at all. We were just kind of hanging out playing our own games.

At 26 years old, Chris was overwhelmed with this realization. The images of the shooting moved him to ask questions about how to communicate and translate church in a way that people would respond to and understand. Chris recalls a passage of Scripture during the moment:

The story of Zacchaeus in Luke 19 had jumped off the page and was haunting me. Christ had come for the outsiders and not the insiders. Everything I had been trained to do was about how to take care of the insiders. It destroyed me. That night, I went to God in prayer asking about what he wanted me to do, but I felt like his response to me was, ‘Chris, what do you dream about? What kind of church do you dream about?’ I wept for hours. I started writing and writing [that evening], and out of that came a kind of vision statement that is actually in our church today from that experience back in 1998.

Chris returned home and shared his experience with Nicki. Though he did not fully understand what had occurred, he knew something was birthed inside of him that night in Denver.

Who Told You to Be Successful?

Eventually, the Marshalls moved to Wilmore, Kentucky, and Chris enrolled in Asbury Seminary. Part of the decision to attend Asbury was its proximity to Cincinnati—just a two-hour drive from Wilmore. They fell in love with this city and had a heart to be right in the middle of it. They secretly longed to live in Cincinnati, but told no one of this desire.

When I would drive through Cincy late at night, I would weep over the city and just pray for its people. I guess I was growing a heart for its people. When I would dream about my future, it was always in the context of Cincinnati. That has only deepened. I want to spend the rest of my life here and ask for God’s kingdom to come.

Chris ended up spending three days a week at Asbury and would go back to Cincinnati for the other four days. Chris recounts another turning point during his time in seminary at Asbury:

My next conversion happened during my first semester in seminary. Viv Grigg, a missionary from New Zealand, was a guest speaker. He was there to ‘beg for our lives,’ to consider walking among the poor in Calcutta. This guy was talking a whole different gospel than what I had heard. At the end of his talk, he just looked at all of us and said, “For you American pastors I have one more question. Who told you to be successful?” And then he turned around and sat down. I sat in my pew and couldn’t move. He had completely undressed me with one question. I literally had nothing left. I guess I realized that, in fact, I’m not sure that all along I was even doing ministry. I was just trying to be successful. I know I cared about ministry and I cared about people, but I realized I was on real sinking sand—needing to be needed, all those kind of things. At that moment, I had to die to my addiction to success, and I realized most of what I had learned in the church growth realm was really how to be more and more successful. That was a real deconstructing moment for me.

The seminary exposed Chris to different perspectives of the Christian experience. George Hunter was a professor at Asbury, and Chris found himself reading the early manuscripts of Hunter’s Celtic Way of Evangelism.1 In the process, Chris discovered an attraction to Saint Patrick and Celtic Christianity. Not only was this due to his own Irish heritage, but he was also struck by the way Patrick went about “organizing” the church into clans. The European model revolved around building a cathedral in the middle of town to which all the roads led. In contrast, instead of starting with a centralized location of ministry requiring people to come and receive readymade spiritual goods and services, the first thing Patrick would do was to fall in love with the people. Only then would he communicate the gospel in ways people could understand. This Celtic approach of sharing Christ with others would have a profound influence on Chris and Nicki’s ministry in the years that followed.

While studying for a Master of Divinity with an emphasis in evangelism and leadership development, the Marshalls attended the Vineyard Community church in Cincinnati, pastored by Steve Sjogren, a key leader in servant evangelism and author of Conspiracy of Kindness. It was a church of over 5,000 members when Chris became an intern under the direction of Jim Henderson (now with Off the Map in Seattle). During this time, Chris started asking missiological questions concerning the real nature of the gospel. Are there elements of the gospel that cannot change while other aspects of the gospel can change?

Up to this point in time, one thing that Chris and Nicki determined was that the best they had experienced in student ministry happened in their home—simply hanging out, showing hospitality, and building community. They realized that transformational ministry not only could happen in small intimate settings, but that these settings were most conducive for ministry. When Chris tried to program the ministry, it was a bad fit:

Even though I could pull it off, I wasn’t in my own skin. Some of what Jim Henderson was teaching me was that it was okay to be different. My heart, at this time, was completely for those outside the church. I had no desire to do anything within the church, but just plant these communities where the church was absent. If we were the first people ever to pull up on the shores of America today, if we didn’t know anything known as church, what would you do? You can’t tell me that you would go and try to spend all your money building a building. There’s no way that would be where you would start. That’s just a part of our assumptions.

While serving in various ministries at the Vineyard, Chris became familiar with Dieter Zander, who was using the term “micro-church” when considering transitions for the church in the future. Zander asked, “What if churches of the future were, in fact, not mega, but really small, and intentionally small, in order to produce the kind of authenticity that people thrive for?” For Chris, this was the paradigm shift that moved him away from trying to be successful, to simply trying to be authentic, genuine, and full of substance:

That was a huge shift for me. It was almost like the last piece of the puzzle. Once I gave myself permission to think small and doable, I started to feel comfortable in my own skin. Even though my gifts were very much out front—teaching and entertaining, those kinds of things—that was not what I was feeling called to. It was not where I felt people would respond to the gospel.

Chris began dreaming what it would look like for a church to be made up of smaller communities that networked together:

It wasn’t a new idea. I knew there was such thing as house churches in the past. You have the Acts model, and I was familiar with the Jesus People in Chicago. And I even read some of Carl George’s stuff on the cell church movement, but even that felt very programmatic to me. It lacked a certain relational part to it. I had done the serendipity training small group stuff, but that was still a little bit more content-driven rather than being about community.

As the Marshalls approached the end of Chris’s seminary journey in 2001, they realized that he would either take a job with the Vineyard in Cincinnati, something he really did not want to do, or they were going to become church planters. They wanted to plant the kind of church that no one else would plant, that no one they knew would even think of encouraging them to plant. From Chris’s perspective at the time, the conversation about emerging church was in its infancy and generally not accepted by the church at large. But he...

Table of contents

• Street Crossers
• Foreword
• 1. Simply Put
• 2. Simply There
• 3. Simply Together
• 4. Simply Go
• Epilogue: Simply Do Something
• Bibliography
• Connections