What we've learned about reaching Young Adults (Part 4)

In the context, Jesus is not using these stories to teach that God is more concerned about unsaved people than saved. He is using them to justify to the Pharisees why he hung out with sinners at all. I'm not arguing the contrary (that God is more concerned about Christians than non-Christians), but simply that evangelism and discipleship are a single, integrated process and cannot be arbitrarily separated.

God may have called City Life to ruthlessly prioritise ministry to unbelievers over believers, but to generalise it to God's call on the Church universal is asking too much of the text.

We had an evening with Stephen Gaukroger talking to our ministry leaders. He read from Ephesians 4 [five fold ministry gifts] and gave an assessment of the Western church. He said that the most dominant model of pastoral leadership was the 'Pastoral Care' model.
He reflected on his travels through the 3rd and 2/3rds world and said that the predominant model in the persecuted church is missional/outreach.

He noted that it was counter intuitive in both situations: the comfortable Western church who can afford to look outwards [without punishment] are more concerned to look inwards and comfort each other, whilst the part of the body of Christ where it is most dangerous to focus outwards, and who arguably have a greater reason to emphasize the 'pastoral care' model, have a missional/outreach focus.

Your church focus is refreshing for me to hear about, as I often think I may as well be King Canute holding back the tide of consumer spirituality.

Hi Stan - Thanks heaps for your encouragement. I love our church and it is a privilege to be a part of what God is doing (despite our failures). God is very kind to us.

Paul - Thanks heaps for your thoughts as well. I agree with you that the context is that of Jesus explaining why he hangs out with sinners.

I do think though that there is evidence in other parts of scripture to suggest that ministry to unbelievers is more important than ministry to believers...

1. Jesus said he came to seek and save that which is lost. The reason he was on earth and not in heaven is for the sake of lost people.

2. Paul said his mission was to testify the gospel of God's grace. He would rather depart and be with Christ which was far better off. If there were no unbelievers, he could be in heaven.

3. Jesus told his disciples that if they follow him, he will make them fishers of men. Jesus could have said, follow me, and I will make you holy, or gracious, or loving, or nice, or pure...etc. But he didn't. So ultimately following Jesus is about ministering to unbelievers.

Again, I am not suggesting that we don't minister to believers. Of course we should. They are our brothers and sisters. We are one with them. But I am just agreeing with Erwin McManus who says that the CHURCH EXISTS FOR MISSION.

If there were no unbelievers, we wouldn't need a church. We wouldn't need to be here. We could go to heaven.

ANY THOUGHTS???

Mark I agree with your position but I think that it is difficult for pastors in already established churches to take that line without paying a big price for it. I accept Gaukroger's summation: that most Western churches emphasize the 'Pastoral Care' leadership paradigm and are thus inward focussed.

This places enormous pressure on the pastor to tick all the boxes in that model constantly. However, in trying to satisfy the expectations of a congregation in this regard you cannot possibly also drive a more outward focus and be a role model yourself. Sometimes it really is one or the other.

A new plant gives you the opportunity to set the culture from the start, but pastors in existing churches have to try and engineer a culture shift to embrace the outward focus. I find that it is easy to get people to agree to having an outward focus [who disagrees with evangelism and mission after all?], but the difficulty is in getting the church to accept a lower level of constant pastoral care.

I remember clearly at one point when we had a pastoral care position vacancy someone said to me "but who is going to care for us [in the interim]". It summed up the way in which pastoral care has been subcontracted out the the normal day to day life of the body of Christ and is now carried out by specialist carers. I wanted to reply "we are going to care for one another the way Christ expects us to!", but it would have been lost on the hearer.

This is [above] the tension I have found in trying to model outreach. Time I have spent in outward focus ministry [including chaplaincy] has often been met with cynicism and sarcasm "off to play soldiers are you?!".

Ultimately I feel that you need to develop a very thick hide if you are a pastor in an established church who wants to change the focus from within to without [in a way that goes beyond rhetoric]. The insinuation is that you don't care. I've even had it thrown at me this week. I hope my hide stays thick!

Hey guys good discussion,

I certainly agree with Stan on the difficulty that exists for changing the culture at existing churches - it is far easier to create your own culture from scratch (not that planting a church doesn't come with any difficulties of its own).

Driscoll talks about the need for "cultural exegesis" ie. looking at the culture you are in and finding the contexts in which you can minister the gospel in a faithful and relevant way. In other words you understand the people and the culture so you can best communicate the timeless truth of the gospel to them in the most effective way - this is not new - it is simply good communication and good gospel preaching!

However, in order to convince a church that is not outward focused and perhaps over-reliant on "care professionals", perhaps we need to do both cultural exegesis and "church culture exegesis", ie. looking at your church culture and finding the contexts in which you can minister the gospel and the call to mission and ministry. In other words understanding your church culture so you can best communicate the timeless truths of the gospel and mission to them in the most effective way.

To often a young leader who is sold on the outward focus thing and who is exegeting his culture well and communicating the gospel in a faithful and relevant way to the surrounding culture has little impact in his own church. He stands and delivers the call to mission and yet no one comes... soon enough he gets frustrated and joins or starts a church plant and perhaps the congregation's only hope of renewal is gone.

Where a revolution in thinking over the last 20 years has been to apply cross-cultural missions strategies to western unsaved people, perhaps the next frontier is for existing church pastors to apply those same missions principles to reach their own congregations with the gospel. While many are busy becoming the pub-going bogan to win the pub-going bogan maybe there needs to be some who become the crusty old overprotective religious types to win the crusty old overprotective religious types. It is a tough gig but for the sake of the kingdom someone has to do it. Heaven rejoices equally when someone who never heard the gospel repents as it does when someone who has sat in church all their life with selfish attitudes repents.

Joe good comments but I can't go with you on:

"maybe there needs to be some who become the crusty old overprotective religious types to win the crusty old overprotective religious types. It is a tough gig but for the sake of the kingdom someone has to do it. Heaven rejoices equally when someone who never heard the gospel repents as it does when someone who has sat in church all their life with selfish attitudes repents."

My problem with that is that in an age when so many millions have never heard the name of Christ, and so many Aussies themselves have no idea about the revolutionary Gospel of grace, why should I spend any more of my precious time, energy, emotional and spiritual resources on crusty believers who have heard the Gospel so many times already and allow so little of its consequences to sink in?

Given the fact that we have limited time and resources, are we not sometimes wasting them on recalcitrants who have had their opportunities in spadefuls? Sometimes I think the average pastor is someone who baby-sits and entertains comfortable middle class suburban Christians and provides them with the consumer experiences they want.

For the crusty old overprotective religious types they have a definite wish list, as does the urbane, progressive modern believer. So much of our time is tied up ensuring that we provide the range of consumer experiences and services these believers want whilst the harvest fields lie waiting.

Trying to get a crusty to repent of selfish attitudes involves calling things as you see it, which is a guaranteed way of bringing on a dummy spit spit of biblical proportions, and another family leaving the church, poisoning their network against you in the process.

Other pastors are happy to receive your departing crusties, because that's church growth innit?

Hi Stan

I can only affirm what you have written!!!

Have you ever considered that God might be calling you to plant a church?

Rick Warren says "Its easier to have a baby than raise the dead".

Andy Stanley often comments that people leave his conferences, quit their jobs as pastors, find another job, and then start a church. They would rather go back to working in a secular job than continue to go through the motions in a church that won't become missional.

Not in anyway suggesting this is God's call on your life. Just putting it out there.

Mark

hey joe,
i feel like i have experiend the same desires that you express for people to sense the renewal of the call to mission...but i tend to agree with stan/mark that it is unlikely that this will work (even though it is certainly possible and has most certainly happened in other churches).

maybe the view that a single pastor can 'whip them up' to fulfill the great commission is similar to how we expect a single pastor to take the entire resonsibility for the care of a congregation. Sometimes, and Im not experienced enough to say how often or how not, I suppose we have to accept that people have chosen to live a certain way and ignore certain calls/commands of God.

It is sad, but maybe the best we can do is pray that God will 'move'/break/challenge/confront them in such a way that not even an inward-focused pastor can hold them back from reaching out to their friends/culture with the message of Jesus?

Hi Mark,

To respond to a couple of specific issues:

1. Luke 19.10 says that Jesus came to seek & save what was lost. It doesn't say that he didn't come for other reasons. In other contexts (e.g. Mt 5.17; Mk 1.38-39; Jn 9.39; 10.10) he says other things about why he came. All of them are true - Jesus had a multi-faceted mission.

2. In Philippians 1.20-24 Paul said that he would rather depart and be with Christ, but that it was better "for you" (1.24) that he remain, where "you" refers to the recipients of the letter: "all the saints in Christ Jesus at Philippi, together with the overseers and deacons" (1.1b). So Paul in that particular case is saying that his work for the church was actually what was keeping him on earth. (If Paul's only ministry was to testify to the gospel of God's grace, one wonders why so much of our New Testament is taken up with his instructions to churches, about issues other than evangelism.)

I'm sure i could go on to make similar points about #3. But more generally, i think what you are doing is trying to redefine something very broad as something rather narrow. What about the passages which indicate that God's plan was to set apart a people for himself (e.g. Titus 2.14)? What about worship? Is the church's call to worship only for the goal of evangelism? Was Paul's instruction that the Philippians be like-minded (Php 2.1-4) only for the purpose of making them more effective at reaching unbelievers?

My point is that evangelism is extremely important, commendable, and scriptural, but defining the church's mission as purely evangelism (or saying that the church universal must prioritise unbelievers before believers) is reductionistic. Even Rick Warren's 5 purposes, while useful, don't come close to covering the breadth of why the church exists. God is a big God, and he has a lot of purposes for the church that bring glory to him, and not all of them are ruthlessly prioritised towards unbelievers.

Your brother (for whom you've been working on this web site!),
Paul

Hi Paul

Thanks for the reply. Some thoughts...

1. I take your point on Phil 1.20-24

2. Although I agree that Jesus gives other reasons for coming (to lay down his life as a ransom, to preach, to pronounce judgement, to bring life, to fulfill the law). All of these can very well be linked to the reconcilliation of men to God.

BUT WE COULD ARGUE THIS ALL DAY. MY QUESTION TO YOU WOULD BE...

DID JESUS PRIMARILY COME TO PERFORM THE MINISTRY OF RECONCILIATION BETWEEN MAN AND GOD?

3. Personally I think Worship is more important than evangelism. This is how I think I would rate the importance of what we are called to do...
a) Worship
b) Evangelism
c) Care for the sick, poor, disadvantaged, etc.
d) Everything else God has called us to.

In other words, I believe that there is a heirachy attacheed to the purposes. I'm sure people disagree. But this is the impression I get from the Bible.

4. Bruce Wilkinson asks the question: If the God of heaven loves you so much that he wants to spend eternity with you, and in Jesus he has done everything necessary for you to go there right now, then why are you still here?

He goes onto argue that the reason we are on earth and not in heaven is because non-Christians still need to hear the gospel. Every other purpose (worship, discipleship, fellowship, ministry, etc) can be done in heaven.

Anyway - I think I am over and out on this one. Feel free to respond. But I may have to refrain.

I do enjoy this discussion though and I am finding it personally helpful.

Mark

Mark I do think it is possible to engineer a culture change within an existing church. I have come from working as an evangelist to the pastoral scene, and I think it is my purpose to help an inward looking context re-orienteer.

It does require a lot of culture shifting which in a Baptist context can often mean that a heavy toll is extracted and exacted upon you [and your family]. This is where I think developing classic Survivor skills is essential. You need to outwit, outplay and outlast. Your first challenge are the gatekeepers of facile traditions, and then beyond them [and including them] are the power base.

Some churches are hungry for this change, others evolve slowly, and others need a revolution. Your average suburban church does have a lot of radical people hidden beneath its urbane surface [http://tinyurl.com/6fuuxd]. If you can herd enough of them into a critical mass you never know what can happen!

Back to the older unwilling to change church goers for a minute...

Jesus took time out for Nicodemus (the Pharisaical religious elite), if He didn't we wouldn't have everybody's favourite verse in Scripture John 3:16. And Nicodemus went on to embalm Jesus' body for burial and probably (only speculation though) had impact amongst the sect of the Pharisees in terms of the evangelism of the early church.

I am not saying to "waste your precious time" I am saying that someone needs to reach these people with the gospel and the call to mission, as a pastor I am called to feed God's sheep, care for God's sheep, shepherd God's sheep. I would say that preaching the gospel to them and calling them to mission is part of that... should I ignore the call God has on my life and the people He has called me to for the sake of "my own precious time". This is not about me, it is about God, His mission field, His sheep and His servants and how they all fit together.

Planting churches is not the ultimate goal of Christian ministry and mission, making disciples is! If those disciples are made from the backrow of a church or the backrow of a Powderfinger concert who cares!

The pastor who lovingly leads, shepherds and feeds the sheep God has given him patiently calling them to repentance, faith and mission will, in God's time, reap a church that is passionate for Jesus and reaching the people around them. All I was saying is that instead of shouting out a self-pious call to mission in an offensive way to older church goers, (my way or the highway sort of stuff), this pastor should use the wealth of his contextualizing skills to call out to his church in the way that they will hear and respond to. This is not a waste of time!

Just could Rick Warren says "raising a baby is easier than raising the dead" does not mean God wants us to do the easier over the harder. Someone has to roll up their sleeves and do the dirty work, I am not talking about pandering to the needs of selfish Christians I am talking about consistent and steady challenge to these Christians to move them to a tipping point of passion for God's name that overflows out of them into ministry and mission. Anyway my God is in the business of "raising the dead" cause He is the resurrection and the life!

Good post Joe. Perhaps we have different idea of what a 'Crustie' is. To me it is someone who doesn't need the Gospel preached, because they made a commitment 20-30 years ago, but it appears to made little difference when it comes to the fruit you would expect.

They do need encouragement I agree, but they also require long-suffering. Where I start to depart from your sentiments is where the emotional/spiritual/mental cost of putting up with some of them becomes a burden too heavy to bear. At that point I am more motivated to pour out myself on behalf of the unreached.

In my last 10 years as a military chaplain its the crusties who have made cynical remarks about "off to play soldiers are you?", and denigrated the role. They do the same when you may be away participating in other missional activities which from time to time mean you are not in the morning service.

I've officially thrown in the towel with them as of now. I'm not interested in the fight, I'm walking away. Pandering to their unreconstructed view of the world and church costs too much.

I think the crusty you have described is just as much in need of the gospel as ever before. To me it is unthinkable that someone who has a genuine relationship with Christ could be so discouraging towards mission. To me their selfishness is a warning that their understanding of their salvation is on shaky ground - now I don't want to be the judge but the bible says "by their fruit you will know them", if there is no fruit (or even bad fruit) then we have to be worried for them.

Paul's call to Timothy is to Preach the Word in season and out of season, and this is more relevant in today's church than ever before! The people in our churches need to hear the message of the cross more than ever, and it should be that message that impacts their lives to reach out in ministry and mission. Just last night at our young adults group we spoke about the "finished work of Jesus on the cross" one of the applications of this study (so obviously rooted in the gospel) was that we should rest from the work of trying to earn favour with God because He has already done that on the cross, but rather devote our time to living a life that ministers His gospel. My challenge was "Don't tell me you understand the finished work of Jesus and then not share the gospel with your friends - if you trust that He has done the work then you must have the faith to proclaim it." See Christians need the gospel to be the basis of their development as well.

At the end of the day I think there are a wonderful group of younger pastors throughout QB that all want the same thing - to see a church that is passionate for Jesus and therefore radically reaching Qld with His gospel. Some are called to plant churches (where they can plant this outward focused culture from the beginning), some have been given pastoral charge over existing churches (and therefore the authority to initiate a change to this culture), and some are under older authority (and raising up youth and young adults with a vision for this culture). All I would love to see is some older pastors (50+) who have authority over older congregations catch the same vision and begin to initiate that change among their people. I think we would do well to accept the call God has given us and not be scared or envious of those in other roles, but rather support one another and pray that in the end God's glory will be victorious!

Great post again Joe.
I agree very much with our ending about we have been called into different contexts [but share the same passion]. The debate about emerging church etc has tended to create dividing line between us: "how sad! you work in one of those outdated, anachronistic institutionalised suburban churches! I'm in a missional plant working amongst the scooter owning fraternity."

I have met more than a few older pastors [and retired pastors] who are remarkably flexible and willing to update. Whether or not their peer group are willing to follow them is another issue.

Thanks Stan for your thoughts on this issue, I appreciate your passion too and pray the scooter owners will come to Christ in droves!

Just for the record: "outdated, anachronistic institutionalised suburban churches" were your words for my church not mine - in my church there are actually some wonderful outward focused people who are seeing results on the mission field and our youth and young adults groups are from a variety backgrounds (churched and unchurched) who are growing in faith and starting to reach out to family and friends in powerful ways. My prayer is this snowballs and more come to Christ!

As for me I am at the end of my college degree and have no idea what God has in store for me and so it could be anything from a "suburban institution" to a plant somewhere, I guess I have to have the humility to be joyful in whatever call He has for me.

Thanks again for your thoughts...

Joe for the record, I minister in what some emergent people would call an "outdated, anachronistic institutionalised suburban church". It was a poor attempt at humour..

That line was a parody of how the debate sometimes runs. I've participated enough in online forums to have picked up similar lines from people who minister in way 'cooler' settings that the local suburban church.