Why Rock the Boat? -- Guest Post

This is a guest post from an author I really like:  my wife, Kaye Sims,  who asks some of the questions she has been wondering about lately.  This one is addressed to church leaders who encourage cutting edge ministry... and then fail to support their pastors who actually implement innovative methods, some of them ultimately losing their jobs as a result.

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Why do you encourage missional thinking?  Why do you bring in innovative thinkers with their radical and transformational ideas?  Why do you invest so much time and energy getting pastors fired up to lead their churches into organic, refreshing, authentic ways of doing ministry?  Why do you push these amazing, wonderful, life-changing concepts and encourage pastors to implement them?  Why do you convince people that disciple-making is not a program, but that it is a radical way of thinking and living, a fresh but ancient wave of spiritual reproduction?  Why do you challenge church leaders to dismantle their fortress mentality and to learn instead what it means to unleash the church - to BE the church outside the institutional walls?

But the real question is this:   When pastors follow these principles and find themselves and many of their people invigorated and becoming more effective in reaching their community, and then when the local power brokers get up in arms about the inevitable break from tradition, why, oh why, do you refuse to stand with those pastors?  Why in the world do you stand instead on the side of the status quo as yet another pastor gets kicked to the curb?  Why do you blame him and the people who followed him into the new Spirit-led ministry that you introduced?  Why do you label them rebellious - those who dared to venture out and live out these transformational disciple-making principles?  

Why indeed do you encourage such innovative thinking that violently upsets the apple cart?

Innovative thinkers blow up the status quo.

Wouldn't it be better to promote ways to keep things running smoothly?  Wouldn't it make more sense to invest your leadership resources and energy in training pastors how to avoid making waves?  Why don't you bring in speakers and organize conferences around the principles of compliance to authority?  Forget finding the "man of peace" in a community who might be instrumental in welcoming a move of God that would transform that town.  Instead why not train each pastor how to quickly recognize the "man of power" in the local congregation - the one who pulls the strings or at least holds them?  Wouldn't a pastor benefit from learning the steps of how to keep that person happy?  

Instead of challenging pastors and people to resist the status quo, maybe it would be smarter or safer to train them to submit to it.  Wouldn't that be the way to keep the machinery oiled and running smoothly?  The way to avoid church splits and to keep the statistics steady and the monthly reports rolling in on time.  Isn't that what matters?  

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Kaye Sims very much enjoyed serving in church ministry for pretty much all her life until suddenly finding herself on the outside.  She has since discovered glorious freedom and loves to  watch for opportunities to be involved in reconciliation, redemption, and restoration.  She still finds herself wondering about lots of things and writes about some of them at her blog,  Wondering Journey.

The Church is a "Com-Bus"

  It's been four years since my church blew up and I was unceremoniously dismissed from the place I had served for forty years as youth director, worship leader, trustee, and missions director, among other things.  I had most recently served on the board of directors by virtue of my position as Elder of Missions and Evangelism when the new pastor told me, "Maybe it would be better if you didn't come at all; you're seen as a divisive person here." (yes, I'm actually quoting him).  I've got to hand it to him; it takes balls to actually ask a life-long leader in your church to quit coming.  He and the other leaders - right up to the district superintendent - had become fed-up with my constant challenges of the status quo.  I guess I should be happy - at least I didn't suffer the same fate as John the Baptist (actually, I am happy; I might still be there if I hadn't been asked to leave).

  One of my challenges to the system surrounded the inability or unwillingness of the church to get down and get dirty with the lost in our neighborhood and around the world.  We existed only to perpetuate our own comfort and our traditions.  We were all about protecting our way of life inside the four walls of the church and our denomination.

  I had seen a vision of what we were, and it was a rather unsettling picture.  I had actually awakened one morning and, still half asleep, an image was brightly projected on the screen of my mind, along with a knowledge of what it meant.  The picture I saw was what I later named the Com-Bus.  It was a large machine moving slowly through a wheat field, and the main chassis of the beast was a large combine, a harvester with a huge cutting head at the front, but there were two things unique about this machine.

  First of all, the cutting bars and the rakes were not moving; they were either shut off or disconnected so that, though the machine was moving over the ground, there was nothing being harvested.  The grain was just being flattened by the large wheels of the monster.

  The second odd thing about this harvesting machine was that the grain hopper behind the cab had been replaced with a bus body so that there were actually seats for several dozen riders.  Not only that, but as I looked closer, I could see that in fact the bus was full of people, but they were not just riding, they were worshipping.  There was a worship leader standing at the front and singing, and the whole crowd were singing along with hands raised and so entranced by the worship that none of them even glanced out the windows.

  If they had looked, they might have seen what I could see as a bystander: The rear emergency door was open and some of their participants - mostly high school graduates, I think - were carefully jumping from that exit and wandering away across the field, never to return to the vehicle again, so the crowd on the bus was slowly shrinking.

  This is where my vision ended and my troubles at church began.  Well, not really; I had been in trouble before for being the annoying elbow in the ribs that tries to awaken others to unpleasant hypocrisies of the system (We come from a long line that includes Martin Luther and a few other dissenters who are mostly all dead now).

  Now the most surprising thing that happened to me in the year following my vision, was that my wife and I, along with 150 other travelers, were also evacuated from the rear emergency door of that colossal machine.  And it wasn't a drill.

  So in the last five years since seeing this vision, I have changed locations and become an outsider, and my view of the realities is from a different perspective.  Mind you, nothing has changed about the church since I've left, nor is there any deviation in the obvious analogies about the huge harvesting machine that has transformed into a self-contained worshipping machine that was actually crushing the ripening grain onto the ground as it lumbered ahead.  And like most graduating seniors, I'm glad I'm on the outside now and do not intend to return.

  I am standing in the field with the other outsiders - both believers and nonbelievers - and have discovered that we really look very much like each other.  Like wheat and tares, I guess, and that's how the Lord said it will be until the end.  I have lately hung out with Mormons, former Catholics and Episcopalians, gays, atheists and "nones"* and have been able to spread the love of God in a less oppositional way than I ever did while functioning within the religious system.  It's a slow process, but more personal and authentic than before.  And more effective.

  I don't know how much longer the institutional Com-Bus will keep rumbling along.  The slow decline of organized religion in America is well documented, but I'm sure it will be around for a long time and still serves a valid purpose to insiders, I guess.  Gene Edwards, in his book Beyond Radical, says the decline started at the Reformation almost 500 years ago and that it will not be complete for another 300 years.  Sorry, I couldn't wait that long.

  The Great Commission has two parts: 1) Reach the Lost, and 2) Teach the Found.  The American church believes in both parts and preaches both parts, but only carries out Part Two.  This is partially because Part One can't be done from inside the walls like it could sixty years ago, and the church, for the most part, will not venture outside the walls.  In a gesture of wishful thinking - or delusion, every church marquee reads, "Everybody Welcome" to a world that passes by every day but will not come inside.

  And there's the rub:  The world will not come inside, and the church will not go outside.

  I guess it's up to outsiders to do the job.  For one thing, we are uninhibited by restrictive policies and denominational doctrines and hellish hierarchies and negative stigmas .  People aren't afraid of you when your only agenda is love.  Lots more could be written on that.  Later.

  Have a great day.  And be real.  And don't be afraid to challenge the status quo; it's not like you'll lose your head over it, although you could lose your comfortable religious world as you now know it.

* "Nones" are those mostly younger Americans who, when polled about religious affiliations, will check the box for "none".  They now make up 20% of the population.  The church will not/cannot reach them.

Beyond Radical- a brief book review

  "THERE IS NO SCRIPTURAL GROUND FOR ANYTHING WE PROTESTANTS PRACTICE."

This is how Gene Edwards begins his book, Beyond Radical (1999), after first stating the mission of the book: "THIS IS A CALL TO BREAK WITH THE PRESENT PRACTICE OF CHRISTIANITY IN A WAY MORE RADICAL THAN WAS KNOWN DURING THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION" (Yes, it really is printed in all caps;  I think he's trying to get someone's attention!)  He then lists more than twenty practices that we do that are not scriptural, stating that "We distort history when we try to teach that these practices are all New Testament, existed in the first century, and are 'right out of the Word of God!'"  Here's a partial list:

THE CHURCH BUILDING

PASTORS

THE ORDER OF WORSHIP

THE SERMON

THE PULPIT

THE PEW

THE CHOIR

CHAPTER AND VERSE

SUNDAY SCHOOL

THE SEMINARY

THE BIBLE SCHOOL

INTERDENOMINATIONAL AND PARA-CHURCH ORGANIZATIONS

ALL PROTESTANTS GOING TO CHURCH ON SUNDAY MORNING

THE ALTAR CALL

  Edwards' book pre-dates the similar but more comprehensive and well-known volume by Frank Viola and George Barna, Pagan Christianity.   Edwards is more famous for his other works, A Tale of Three Kings, and The Divine Romance, among others.  He and Viola have been part of the house church movement for several decades.  By the way, the modern house church movement dates back to the early 1800's, and only lately has experienced an acceleration in growth, I believe, in response to the fast-growing exodus of about one million believers in North America who are leaving the institutional church every year, and also in response to emerging changes in Western culture.  One of those major changes is the growing quest for authenticity.  The list above should explain the need for that.