How to Start a Lay Church, Principle VI: Train People to Become Living Bibles

Posted on June 24, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Make sure the Bible is inside the Christians in your lay church, not tucked under one arm.

Meaning:

Materials are for internalizing. They’re not intended as permanent prosthetics. From the very beginning of their faith life and continuing steadily throughout it, Christians must learn the whole counsel of Scripture by heart so that ultimately no external printed text is required when they’re out and about and engaged in the Christian ministry of mirroring Christ to the world. That’s the way the New Testament and other oral-oriented literature is designed, and persecuted Christians can tell you of the necessity of this practice.

Hymns and music also need to be able to be learned in a way that they can be shared anytime, anywhere, by nonprofessionals (i.e., people like me who have sub-angelic voices and absolutely no guitar skills).

In the words of the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 3:2, “You are our letter.” You are (or are intended to be) a living Bible.

Regrettably, despite the historically unparalleled motherlode of printed Bibles readily available in the United States, there sure is a dearth of living ones.

Zondervan—the Christian publisher—did a survey a year or two back. They found out that the average American Christian owns nine Bibles—nine—and is actively trying to buy one more.

But what about North Korean Christians?

Here is the testimony of one young, new North Korean Christian–a girl sold into sexual slavery in China who was rescued by a Christian missionary. The missionary enrolled her in an underground seminary for North Koreans in China.

At the age of 22, after four and a half months of training, I left the safety of the seminary in China and crossed the river to go back inside of North Korea… My purpose was to share the Gospel with my family and friends.

I was finally arrested after one and a half years, when the North Korean state security agency discovered the Bibles and hymnals I was distributing inside of North Korea.

The North Korean police treated me cruelly as if I were a terrorist. The most difficult punishment I faced was being required to sit in one position for twenty-four hours without moving.

One month went by, then two months. Almost a whole year of my life passed by, with me behind bars. I thought God had forgotten me.

Then something happened that helped me to understand that God had a specific purpose for sending me to that prison.

A new prisoner arrived. Her name was EJ.

EJ had been a spy for North Korea. She had been serving undercover in China, trapping North Korean defectors who had escaped. She would send them back to North Korea to die. She tried to defect from China to South Korea but she was caught and sent to North Korea to the same jail as me. She felt so guilty for all she had done. She wanted to know if God existed and if He could ever forgive her.

I told EJ about 1 John 1:9 which says that if we confess our sins He is faithful to forgive. I also shared other verses with EJ that I had memorized. After many days, EJ confessed all her sins and received Christ as her savior.

One evening EJ had a dream. In her dream the Lord told EJ he was going to bring me out of prison. This was a crazy thought, since everyone knew I was going to be sent to a concentration camp for my crime. But EJ believed the dream. She was so happy for me but sad for herself. “I cannot make it here by myself,” she cried. So I asked the Lord what I could do to help her. God directed me to write down some scripture for her.

There was no paper, so we had to use the only thing we had to write on:

Toilet paper.

I didn’t have a pencil to write with, but EJ was able to smuggle one from the investigation room. And that’s how I began to write out ten verses as a “toilet paper Bible” for my new sister in Christ.

When I was finished writing, EJ tried to return the pencil, but it fell from her pocket and the guard saw it. He interrogated her angrily.

I was afraid that EJ would confess about the toilet paper Bible I had written, but she didn’t. When I asked her why, she replied, “You risked your life to give it to me, so I will carry it wherever I go.

The average American Christian has nine Bibles.

One North Korean—a Christian for four and a half months—constructs, from memory, a 10-verse toilet paper Bible to pass on to a former persecutor.

Who is the more effective student of the Scriptures?

In the lay church we vote for the North Korean Christian.

And that’s why we learn, by heart, one story and one song each week.

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How to Start a Lay Church, Principle V: Meet in Places that You Already Use

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Don’t rent or buy a building for your lay church. For a number of reasons that will be especially apparent long about Principle 12, no lay church should be gobbling up lots of people anyway. If it does, it will have an exceedingly hard time training each Christian in each area of ministry and growing each believer to fullness in Christ. Specialization begins to break out, and, with it, institutionalized immaturity.

Lay churches are, by design, household-based, meaning that they are primarily about the transformation of existing relationship networks and the people within them—and only secondarily about the expansion of such networks. Lay church expansion happens through diffusion. That is, since my relationship network does not overlap completely (or, in some cases, even remotely) with that of my college-age children still living at home, as they grow to fullness in Christ, they use what they’ve learned to plant their own lay church to reach the people in their existing network. To borrow an image from Jesus in Matthew 13:33, the church is the yeast and the existing social network is the bread. The problem with our thinking today is that the church itself becomes the bread, and as it continues to grow it needs a bigger and bigger, uh, breadbox. Meanwhile, existing social networks remain un-transformed.

Because the focus is the transformation of existing social networks and the people in them, the choice of where to meet is obvious: we meet exactly where we’ve already been meeting. If we rented or bought a new place to meet, we’d be leavening thin air and leaving the loaf untouched; ergo, mission bungled.

And certainly the fringe benefits of meeting where the household or network already meets are apparent enough: The lay church can learn how to convene anywhere, anytime—an essential skill, as persecuted Christians can attest. We begin to see our homes and hangouts as holy places, and we start treating them accordingly. Expenses stay close to nonexistent, so Christians can devote their tithes to displaying God’s love to the world—more on this coming up when we get to principle 11, on tithing and giving.

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How to Start a Lay Church, Principle IV: Receive, Remember, Pass On

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Pastor Foley

In almost every walk of life—from football games to July 4 celebrations to military special forces training to even street gangs and college fraternities—human beings love tradition and love being a part of it. We understand not only its value and its importance but its vibrancy.

Except when it comes to church.

There, tradition is seen as stifling, stodgy, and spirit-impairing. (Go figure: In a football stadium tradition is seen as spirit-building. But in a church, it’s seen as spirit-killing.)

And I’m not talking here about the extreme love of novelty that has church pastors doing motorcycle jumps for Jesus or giving away videogame systems to build Easter attendance. I’m talking about the near-universal practice of switching up the songs and the scriptures in the worship service every week. This seems so natural to us, but it overlooks that early hymnals were more than forerunners of the juke box (or overhead projector) printed so that people knew what words to sing. They were devotional guides, given to Christians to meditate on and think about not only when they were in worship but when they weren’t.

Take Methodists John and Charles Wesley, for example. Jonathan Powers details in Theology of Worship the genesis of the original Methodist hymn book:

[T]he purpose of this collection was to be a daily devotional guide as much as a musical book used in worship. John Wesley writes in the prologue to the hymnbook that its purpose was to provide “a full account of scriptural Christianity” and “the experience of real Christians.”

Thus, the hymnbook was used to help focus an individual’s spiritual growth from the time of conversion to the incorporation with the fellowship of believers. The content Charles Wesley wrote was broad in theme, ranging from lyrics on the Eucharist, Trinity, and Holy Scriptures to lyrics concerning Easter, Church calendar, and other Church celebrations.

The invention of the overhead projector and Powerpoint didn’t make that obsolete. It only seems that way because we’ve shifted away from a practical commitment to growing every Christian to fullness in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Given that the purpose of the hymnbook was to focus spiritual growth, why defeat that by switching the songs in church every week? Why not pick four songs for the month, introducing one each week and practicing it in the church’s main service—the nightly household worship service—and digging into the theology of it until the church actually learns it and the theology it contains?

That’s what we do in the .W Lay Church—and not just with hymns, but with scriptures (one a week), the Nicene Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer. We do a mix of extemporaneous prayers, too, and what we find is that our extemporaneous prayers get better and deeper because the purpose of memorizing songs, scripture, and creeds is that it shapes your imagination and your spirit and makes it so you don’t spend your whole life praying like a five year old. You pray kind of like a 2,000 year old—someone whose spirit is soaked in two millennia of church tradition. Lest you think that stifles creativity, remember that jazz musicians learn their scales and arpeggios inside and out in order to improvise well. If you don’t learn your scales and arpeggios, your improvisation is music to no one’s ears, least of all Christ’s, who says, “Didn’t you ask me to teach you how to pray?”

“For what I received I passed on to you”—those are the words from the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:3. And that’s God’s call to the church: Lay aside the love of novelty. Lay aside the ahistoricity. There’s a reason the church has held on to things like the Lord’s Prayer and the Nicene Creed for a couple millennia: They’re crucial to growing individual believers to fullness in Christ. When we ensure that each Christian learns them deeply, along with the stories of scripture and the songs of the church across the ages, we ensure that we’re wading into the stream of orthodoxy rather than ending up in the ditch of personal preference.

There’s one other very important thing the church has managed to hold onto across the ages and denominations: the content of the gospel. Sadly, though we live at a time when focus on the Scripture is ostensibly very high, the ability of the average Christian to correctly pass on the gospel that the church has received and been called to treasure and pass on…is actually very low. Contrary to popular evangelical thought, “the gospel” is not a general statement of what it means to be a Christian. It’s not one’s testimony. It’s not the Roman Road. It’s not John 3:16. The gospel is the specific content of 1 Corinthians 15:3-7—the announcement of a new king, grounded in the fulfilled prophecies of the Old Testament and the historical witness of those who saw Jesus raised from the dead:

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.

Paul calls this “of first importance,” and every Christian ought to know this passage by heart. It is the gospel. When we treat anything else as of first importance—like the Roman Road or our own testimony—we fall. These other things are true and important, but they are not the gospel, and they are not of first importance.

“Received” and “delivered” are key Christian terms. They indicate that our vocation as Christians is to receive the witness that has been faithfully preserved by the church, “surrender” to it wholly with all of our being (hearing the Word), and then deliver it to others (doing the Word).

And that leads to a key aspect of the lay church: Definitely associate your lay church with a denomination—one that affirms the historic creeds and Scriptures and practices of the church. (And please choose one that gets the whole lay church concept, of course!)

Denominations have lost their luster these days, and certainly none of them should ever be viewed as anywhere near perfect. But it’s time for us to reconsider our distaste of denominations. What a denomination is—a good denomination, anyway—is an effort to preserve a stream of tradition worth preserving. Locating your lay church within one means you don’t pick and choose what to receive and pass on. If there are errors in denominations (and there are, of course), they are no more (and they are almost always far less) than the errors that come with we mere time-bound, fallible Christians cherry-picking through church history the parts we like and think ought to be observed and preserved. “Nondenominational” is shorthand for “ahistorical,” and “ahistorical” is shorthand for “The Church Reshaped According To My Likes and Dislikes.”

The idea that we overcome schisms and divisions—and that we achieve Jesus’ desire that we be one—by not affiliating with a denomination is, at best, an ill-formed thesis that has been sufficiently debunked in our time. “Nondenominational” churches are no less schismatic and divisive than denominational churches. In reality, they have fewer historical resources and accountability structures on which to draw when they do end up in trouble. Associating with a denomination gives you a history and theological and liturgical tradition to study, learn, embrace, be humbled with, and exemplify the best characteristics of. If you affiliate with a Methodist denomination, reclaim the tradition of the hymnal as a theology primer; if Lutheran, dig into the Larger or Smaller Catechism; if Presbyterian, be formed by the Westminster. Good theology is good theology wherever it’s found.

And receiving, remembering, and passing on good theology—through Scripture, song, creed, and the two-millennia history of the Christian church—is the best antidote for novelty there is.

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