How to Start a Lay Church, Principle IX: Leave the Kids in the Room with You When You’re Doing Church

Posted on July 1, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Humanity is mimetic, which is a fancy way of saying that God has wired us to learn by imitation far more than by any other method, whether explanation or training or emotional stimulation.

Or coloring book page or Veggie Tales video.

So we shouldn’t be surprised by the report from the Barna Research Group on who teens turn to as role models. The upshot of that study:

Even while limiting the answers to non-parents, family members still comes out on top. The most commonly mentioned role model is a relative—37% of teens named a relation other than their parent as the person they admire most. This is typically a grandparent, but also includes sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts, and uncles. After “family,” teens mention teachers and coaches (11%), friends (9%), and pastors or other religious leaders they know personally (6%).

Animated talking vegetables and Bible superhero action figures failed to make the cut.

But equally important to who youth regard as role models is why. The Barna study provides the answer: character in proximity. No shocker here: We become like who we’re around.

That being the case, why do we pull children out of “big church” and put them in “children’s church” where they are robbed of the ability to imitate us? Is it any wonder that kids drop out of church with clockwork regularity when they hit college age, since they’ve had no experience imitating adult Christians?

In 1 Corinthians 11:1, Paul writes, ‘Imitate me, just as I also imitate Christ,’ and in 2 Thessalonians 3:7, he adds, ‘For you yourselves know how you ought to follow our example.’

But how would children know how to follow our example if they never see it?

I know, I know: left in the “main sanctuary,” kids swing from the ceiling fans during sermons and make lots of unsolemn noises during prayer time. So we pull them out of the main sanctuary and plop them down in a kiddie sanctuary and give them kiddie versions of sermons, songs, Scriptures, and offering times. Goal: that the kiddie versions would train them for the real thing.

Reality: the kiddie versions teach them that sermons, songs, Scriptures, and offering times are for kiddies.

So endure the pain, the swinging from the ceiling fans, the unsolemn noises. They watch more than you think they do, you know.

When I lead the Korean .W congregation by videoconference, I don’t speak Korean, so while they pray I’m free to occasionally crack one eyelid open and survey the situation. Without fail, I see the children watch an adult pray—for just a moment, and then they go back to coloring or swinging from the chandelier or smashing a sibling’s face into the ground.

Point is, you have to be willing to endure the awkwardness in order to let the kid get close enough to you for long enough to observe you and imitate you.

Gerald Schlabach, author of Unlearning Protestantism, a brilliant book on how to be Protestant in all of the right ways and none of the wrong ones (after all, knowing what to protest and what not to is half the battle), notes that we moderns “have ever fewer resources for forming lives of Christian discipleship or communities of Christian witness.” That’s especially true of our children. All of the Veggie Tales videos and Bible superhero action figures in the Sunday School room can’t take the place of what you learn by watching your parents worship–and by joining in, no matter how clumsily or sporadically.

Habits require training, as one internalizes moral motor skills that one can only clumsily imitate at first, based on the example of others. If those habits are to be good rather than bad, however, practitioners must apprentice with those more advanced in the craft–in this case, the craftlike practice of Christian discipleship.

Imitation, not age-appropriate curriculum design, is the key method the Scripture commends for making disciples. And it’s the key method for how kids—and all human beings–learn. We’re mimetic. Kids stop going to church when they become adults because they never saw how adults act as Christians.

So leave your kids in the room when you’re doing lay church. Have them learn the same songs and stories you learn at the same time, in the same way. As they get older, practice reciting the Bible stories you’re learning in front of them, with them holding the Bible and correcting you when you mess up.

But rather than write more, let me just invite you to listen to the audio below. It’s one of the Korean dads in our .W/Korea congregation being imitated by his three and five year old (ostensibly non-English speaking) sons in their family worship time as they both learn the song assigned for the week in .W church.

Enjoy–and imitate.

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How to Start a Lay Church, Principle VIII: Measure the Growth of Each Member Weekly

Posted on June 29, 2011 by Pastor Foley

It’s a fair question to ask: Is spiritual growth really measurable? What would we measure? And how would we measure it?

Some Christians cringe at the very idea of trying to measure spiritual things. They think of spiritual things as being so, well, spiritual that any attempt to measure them at best cheapens the Christian life and at worst plunges us into the silliest kinds of legalism as we endeavor—foolishly—to trap bits of God in a paper bag. “You can measure how many chapters of the Bible I’m reading a day,” they challenge, “But since when does that show whether I’m growing as a Christian?”

True, that. Measuring things like church attendance, Bible reading, and minutes spent in prayer daily are hardly reliable predictors of much of anything (save, perhaps, legalism). Cue the verses here about Jesus rebuking the Pharisees for tithing mint and dill and cumin and neglecting the weightier matters of the law (Matthew 23:23) or Jesus rebuking the Pharisees for searching the Scriptures but missing profoundly how they testify of him (John 5:39) or Jesus rebuking the Pharisees for just about everything. In fact, you might be able to make a decent case that Jesus’ disdain for the Pharasaical is a disdain for what Pharisees choose to measure.

But that shouldn’t scare us away from all measurement of spiritual growth. To the contrary, as in the case of the Pharisees, what we measure (and what we fail to measure) provides penetrating insights into what’s really important to us. (Where your measure is there your heart is also?)

In Principle VII we talked about how hearing and doing the word are two sides of the same coin, and that what keeps doing from being works righteous is doing the word, which, by definition, launches us clear out of the realm of human merit and into the realm of God “making his appeal through us” (2 Corinthians 5:20)—God doing through us what only God can do. We pass on, in other words, only what we have received from him.

In the same way, helpful measurements of spiritual growth involve a repentant turning away from measuring human activity–e.g., Bible chapters and prayer minutes per day–and turning toward the evidences of God’s strength and power that are observable in and around us—e.g., us forgiving and reconciling with our enemies in Jesus’ name.

Interestingly, that’s what the scriptures show God measuring:

  • Sometimes He measures the absence of divine activity (like in Matthew 23:32, where Jesus challenges, ‘Fill up, then, the measure of the sin of your forefathers!’).
  • Sometimes He measures the inhibition of divine activity (like in Hebrews 5:12, where the writer castigates, ‘In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food!’).
  • But most often scripture shows God measuring His own presence in us.

The perfect illustration of the last point is 2 Peter 1:3-9. Give it a careful read in light of the subject of what we measure:

His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires. For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The list starts with faith–so that no one can boast–and continues on with qualities that, properly understood, are authentically divine, not human. When we measure those weekly, we prevent ourselves and our fellow lay church members from being ineffective and unproductive. Sadly, that’s a measure that few churches make at the level of individual members–which is probably what explains the ineffectiveness and unproductiveness of many folks hanging around church these days.

But someone might protest that God’s activity is not easily detectable or definable. Like Jesus says in John 3:8, “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

But in that verse Jesus is not claiming that we won’t recognize God’s work when we see it (just check out Romans 1 for Paul’s argument to the contrary); rather, He is claiming that God’s work is not subject to human structures or boundaries–which is why in lay church the focus is not on measuring organizational statistics. The lay church is just the tomato trellis, so to speak–vital to the growth of healthy tomatoes, but not the subject of our measurements (except insofar as we seek to determine if we are an effective trellis!).

In Matthew 13:31-33 Jesus tells parables about yeast and mustard seeds, two entities barely visible at first. Two lessons can be drawn:

  1. God’s work in the lives of lay church members may be barely observable at first, but it is well worth our keen observation—it’s nothing less than how we “see God”;
  2. By God’s grace that barely observable work can grow until it is apparent to everyone.

So in lay church no small time is devoted to enabling each member to self-assess their spiritual growth weekly—and to grow from the helpful inquiries of others.

Few were better at this than John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. He trained his lay leaders to open every meeting with these kinds of measurement questions. (Elmer Towns does a nice job of updating these questions in the recognition that members at different levels of spiritual development benefit from different types of questions—check out his three sets of questions for members at various levels of Christian maturity.)

Measuring the growth of each member of your lay church weekly trains them—and you—to train your eyes on the kind of things that only God can do–and is doing–in your midst.

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How to Start a Lay Church, Principle VII: Commit to the Inseparability of Hearing and Doing the Word

Posted on June 27, 2011 by Pastor Foley

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them,” says Jesus in Matthew 7:24-25, “will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.” By contrast, Jesus adds in Matthew 7:26-27, “And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”

The rain will fall, the floods will come, and the winds will blow.

And the only way for the house to stand is to build it on the hearing and the doing of the word.

Sadly, this sometimes makes some Christians nervous, as if what is being affirmed is that we are saved by faith and works, which, clearly, we are not. They quote Paul in Ephesians 2:8: “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”

But Paul does not end his train of thought with Ephesians 2:8. He continues on in Ephesians 2:9 to say, “Forwe are his workmanship,created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”

For Paul, as David W. Hegg points out on page 51 of his masterful little book, The Obedience Option, the contrast is not only between our faith and our works (verse 8 ) but between our works and God’s works (verse 9). By faith we cease to work our works and instead work works that only he can do through us. Jesus makes  a similar point in John 9:4 when he says, “We must”—now that’s an interesting word to use, isn’t it?—“work the works of him who sent me.” Working his works equals doing the word. We stop working our works, doing our word, and we instead do his. Any talk of merit is out of the question because it’s, you know, his works.

His word.

Why do Jesus and Paul (and James, for that matter, in James 2:17) link hearing and doing, faith and works, so closely?

Answer:

Because all good teachers (including and especially Jesus, the master teacher) know that hearing and doing reinforce learning as two parts of the same process.

Hearing and doing, faith and works need not be opposed to each other. Yes, many people do believe that they need to be “good people” in order to “go to heaven when they die.” But the solution is not to teach them the irrelevance of conduct and behavior. It’s to train them in such a way that their conduct and behavior can only stand to reinforce their utter reliance upon God.

When Jesus invites Peter to walk on the water in Matthew 14:22-33, it would be beyond idiocy for Peter to conclude that his sea stroll was meritorious. Instead, the logical conclusion is, “It is humanly impossible for me to walk on the surface of a liquid. Therefore, the only explanation is that Christ made this possible. This would explain why I sunk when I saw the wind.”

And, grievously, this is the biblical link between hearing and doing that is often dismissed out of hand by Christians. They hear, for instance, Jesus’ words in the Lord’s Prayer, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” and they think, “Ah, I am unable to forgive those who trespass against me. Were I even to try, I would be seeking to earn God’s favor. Therefore, Jesus must be asking me to do this so I will realize it is impossible and that I thus need a savior to avoid being sent to hell.”  End result: they accept Christ as savior…and they remain oddly comforted by their very immaturity–their inability to forgive their enemies.

But there’s another option. We can say, “Ah, it is humanly impossible for me to forgive those who trespass against me. But Christ has forgiven me my trespasses. Since it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me, he is giving me his forgiveness to pass on to my enemies. How can I pass on his forgiveness through me in order to make his grace visible in my life?” End result: they are motivated to practice receiving the grace of God deeply and passing it on fully…and when they forgive their enemies they know that—in the words of Paul in Ephesians—“this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.”

How could it be anything else?

As Alan Kreider puts it, the early Christians “did not think their way into a new life; they lived their way into a new kind of thinking.”[1]

Believing in the indispensability of hearing and the dispensability of doing is not gospel by a long shot. It’s Gnosticism—the age-old heresy that we are saved by secret knowledge that others do not possess. In contrast, Jesus—and Paul, and James, and all the writers of Scripture, every last one of them—insist that God’s word is living and active, intending to be performed. Performing it is in no way meritorious, because the performance is by definition humanly impossible. It’s his performance, from first to last.

When we understand this, we see that God uses our doing of the word as a means of grace to us—a way we come to see his glory more clearly, rely on him more completely, and come to know him more fully. We hear what he has done for us—all grace!—and we obey his call to pass this (his work) on to others, not only in word but in deed. His deed, using us—all grace again! The only sane response is to fall at his feet and worship.

In the lay church, hearing and doing the word are inextricably linked. Every month begins a focus on a different Work of Mercy. At the start of the month the question is, “How does Christ perform this Work of Mercy on us?” As the month unfolds, the question becomes, “Having received this grace, how does Christ now call us to pass it on to others so that he may be made visible (not just audible!) to us and, through us, to others?”

Then, in the culminating week of each month, the lay church hits the street to “do the word” together.

When our Work of Mercy last month was sharing our bread with the poor, for example, we took our worship to the park, bringing food we had prepared. We reviewed together how Christ shares his bread with us. Then we ate bread, sharing the Lord’s supper together. Then we dispersed across the park—not to distribute our food to the poor (after all, that’s not the word the Scripture calls us to do), but to share meals together with the poor.

It takes practice—that’s the point! We learn from each endeavor—not only how to mirror Christ more effectively the next time, but also gaining new insights into how Christ performs that work on us. Grace upon grace.

For example, Mrs. Foley and I ate with a group of mentally ill homeless men and women at a bus station near the park in Korea. They were physically quite dirty and their words were largely incoherent. One woman, in fact, was mute. As we shared our food with the group, one of the men shared his food with us in return—a hot dog he had retrieved from the trash. Another man rebuked him for this, insisting how worthless they all were and how their food was not even fit for dogs. Yet when Mrs. Foley and I ate the bun (praise God for the promise of Mark 16:18!), they were beyond thrilled. Suddenly we received an insight into how we must appear to God, and how amazed we are that he receives us and our meager and insufficient offerings and not only dispels our notions of worthlessness but uses our offerings and us to transform the world.

I could of course share that story with a congregation in a sermon, and they would be moved. But then the rains, floods, and winds would come, and, according to Jesus, their houses would collapse in great and terrible ways. Stories have a way of vaporizing into sentimentality when the twister touches down.

But for those who fanned out across the the park in Korea that day to do the word we had heard—they know they earned no credit with God for their actions. Instead, they received something far more precious: a deepening experience of grace leading to a deepening dependence on God; hearing and doing that can withstand storms because our households and families now cling that much more closely to the one who reveals himself to—and, astonishingly, through—us, and who promises he always will.

[1] Alan Kreider, “Baptism, Catechism, and the Eclipse of Jesus’ Teaching in Early Christianity,” Tyndale Bulletin 47.2 (Nov. 1996), p. 328.

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