Becoming the Church that Jesus comes back for - part 1
From a podcast by Kairos Connexion
John McGinley is the executive director of Myriad, which has a vision to support the planting of thousands of churches led mainly by lay people, and author of Mission Shaped Grace and The Church of Tomorrow.
At a 2024 Kairos Connexion conference, John spoke, in 2 parts, on becoming the Church that Jesus comes back for. Here are some excerpts:
For the first section, what I'm bringing today is something of the challenges of what the Church has faced and still faces. In the second section, I'll go into what I'm seeing and what I'm sensing God is leading us into.
If you look at church history, you can see moments where there were significant seismic shifts in what the Church looked like. 500 years ago, it was the Reformation. If I'm right and, as others are saying, this is one of those moments. In our lives, we build up stuff that served us once, but no longer serves us. It's not that they were wrong. It's just that they've become part of the furniture. And actually, they've increasingly come to be in the way of what and how we want to live now.
And so if we use the image of a home, we need to clear stuff out in order to to bring new things in and to live in a different way. I think something of what God is doing now is saying there's a lot of stuff that's built up, and I need to clear it out.
If this is what's happening, we're having to discern what stays, what goes, what can be renewed? What still has value but won't have long term worth? How do we manage this transition - this clearing away?
There's an emotion to letting go. It's not that things are wrong per se. They've served us, we're connected emotionally with them and we've got a sense of confidence in them. So they matter to us. And then there's the effort of doing that and of stepping into new ways of living and building new things. And seeing new things form is also really exhausting. But I really believe that it's absolutely vital that we go on this journey with the Lord.
As I was preparing. I felt the Lord draw me to the familiar passage of Mary and Martha. As I as I prepared for today, I really felt God's speaking about it. It's about a willingness to lay things down and not follow accepted patterns in order to focus upon the Lord. It's not taking and fulfilling all that's expected of us and our responsibilities. We're going have to break some rules, have to not meet expectations, have to lead in a way that other people find confusing, upsetting, offensive.
So just a few things which I think God might be wanting to dismantle and clear out. Not that we're trying to have an exhaustive list, but something that you can take away and go, "I think that's where I might need to start.":
1. Professionalised church leadership
I think this has led the Church into so much of the problems that we've had, as it results in a number of other things.
First of all, it results in a disempowered church - the idea is the leader leads, it's their ministry, and everybody else helps. The leader is not seeing their role as empowering and raising others up in leadership in terms of the Ephesians 4 passage. Instead, they are the focal point, they're delivering ministry and others come to help. The picture of what leadership looks like, what ministry looks like, for everybody, has become so distorted, so normalised that people can't even imagine a different way of living in which they take full responsibility step into the fullness of what God wants to do with them. And through this pattern of ministry, we have not attracted or empowered younger generations.
The other thing that the professionalised church leadership does is it enables us to have an institutional system because the professional leaders maintain the system. And that enables that that pattern of ministry and that structure to become fixed and formalised and established in a way that it's controlling, immovable, and the result is that so much is not allowed in that system.
We have to come to a conviction that this has to change. And out of that conviction will come the leading of the Spirit into the things that he's wanting to birth and work through us.
2. Consumerism
When professional ministers provide the church's ministry, everybody else comes and consumes it. And the result is that it so hard to call people to live a sacrificial life for Christ. I don't know if you recognise that but as you call people to follow Jesus, they're expecting that their job is to turn up on a Sunday, to be good people, to pray some prayers and to help out on a rota. That's the vision the church gave them. And the idea that you would ask anything more of them or call them to anything greater than that is something way outside anything they expected.
The result is that most of us are trying to disciple people who never died. We never lead them to a place where they lay their life down for Jesus in response to all that he is. And then the result of that is that they follow him into the fullness of who they already are.
3. Our mission
We have lost confidence in the Gospel. We've lost confidence in the mission of God that he's called us to. And so predominantly, churches have become pastoral and seeking to look after those who are already members. Mission happens over there by specialists, parachurch organisations. People who were especially keen would do it, but it wouldn't be the church on mission.
There's a big gap. If you're just doing mission without any sense of community and connection with relationship and friendship and then you reach people, they may have encountered something spiritual but now you are asking them to move from here to there and join that? We need to be willing to change to meet the people where they are and to incarnate the gospel.
4. The Western industrial church principle
In the West, we have learned to mass manufacture and do commerce. We formed our Church at a time when we were in the boomer generation, and where we have prioritised and emphasised strategy, intellectual strength, money, organisation, marketing and having levers that we can pull in order to make it happen. We have programmes, employ people in order to to do certain tasks and we've increasingly professionalised things. In and of themselves, none of these things are wrong. But what they betray is, is that we are not dependent on the Lord.
We are looking for our own strength, our own ability, our own way of sorting things. And I want to say that this is so much our default setting, that you won't even realise that it's happening. We cannot systematise the work of God because the danger is that it will become the thing you are really depending on instead of the Lord.
We're in a time where we have to make deliberate choices to lead in a way that won't feel natural, that won't feel like we're competent and confident in it, but instead will be something that comes out of conviction of what the Lord is doing.
Part 2 is here.
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From a podcast by Kairos Connexion, 09/07/2024