How to Start a Lay Church, Principle III: Train Members to be Generalists, not Specialists

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Division of labor is such a fact of life today that it’s hard for us to even imagine what it would look like to be a church where every member is called—and trained hard and weekly—to do every ministry task. But that’s the vision of the New Testament, and it’s the calling of Christ to each Christian.

Truly, it’s the church’s only task: by the power of the Holy Spirit, grow each member into a full representation of Christ. Train each member to do all the things he did—greater things, in fact, according to Jesus in John 14:12.

And whatever you do, don’t shrink each Christian down into being one pixel in what is supposed to be a composite portrait of Jesus.

The Gospels don’t portray Jesus administering a gifts test to his disciples and dividing up the labor according to their skills and interests. Instead, Jesus trains his disciples by living with them and having all of them to do all of the same things he did–healing, proclaiming, sharing bread, opening their homes, throwing banquets, and even taking up their crosses.  These weren’t preliminary activities designed to help them settle on one or two preferred ways of serving him. Doing all the activities – grounded in inward spiritual disciplines like prayer, scripture study, and worship- is how Jesus taught his followers to receive God’s grace fully and mirror it to others completely. Because it turns out that the best way for someone to receive the grace of God fully… is to regularly put them in a position where they have to pour it out fully as well.

Christians today sometimes cite Paul’s analogy of the body (in 1 Corinthians 12) as justification for focusing their service on one or two areas while leaving the remainder to someone else. They think of themselves as an eye and not a foot—a minister to the homeless but not a proclaimer of the Gospel, for example—and assume that Christ somehow mystically stitches all of the disjointed pieces into a gorgeous physique. But contemporary biology demonstrates that even a single eye cell contains the DNA necessary and sufficient to reproduce not only the foot but the whole body. Ministry “specialists” who are unable to reproduce the whole of Christ’s body are cancer cells, fostering unhealthy growth and distortion in the proper functioning of the body.

Worse, they’re people who never really come to consciously experience the fullness of God’s grace. Obviously, loving others so that God will love us is a super-serious theological error. But so is believing that we can experience God’s love deeply when we horde it. Just as with forgiveness, the fullness of God’s grace is never really experienced by us until we pour it out fully—in all its various forms—on others who don’t deserve it, just like we didn’t and don’t.

I wrote The Whole Life Offering book as one possible plan we Christians can follow to ensure that we’re each undertaking and growing in each Work of Mercy (i.e., each category of neighbor love that Christ performs on us and calls us to mirror to others) and each Work of Piety (i.e., each internal spiritual discipline Christ grants us to come to know God and express our love back to him) each year. In the book I propose an annual calendar, which is working really well for our lay church:

  • Begin the year with a month of preparation, reacquainting ourselves with the Bible’s overall plan and provision for growing to fullness in Christ.
  • Focus on one Work of Mercy each month. Different church leaders have created slightly different Works of Mercy lists over the millennia, but the list of ten that I propose (e.g., do good to your enemies, share your bread, open your home, etc.) won’t start any controversies.
  • Analyze and experience each dimension of that Work of Mercy by using each of the seven Works of Piety as a lens. We start each the month searching the Scripture to determine how Christ performs this Work of Mercy on us. We progress through learning how the church has understood and undertaken the Work of Mercy across the ages. Then we spend time working through the Works of Piety of prayer, worship, and self–denial related to the Work of Mercy before ending the month serving and giving this Work of Mercy to others.

Every year and every month, the idea is to grow every member to fullness in Christ by experiencing the fullness of God’s love for us…and to train them how to pour God’s love out fully in love of our neighbors.

Which Jesus says pretty much covers the two greatest commandments on which the rest of the Bible hang.

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How to Start a Lay Church, Principle II: Establish that Sunday is not the Main Service

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Getting together for Sunday worship is so fundamental to westerners that we’ve made that gathering synonymous with the word “church.” It’s hard for us to conceive of a way of being Christian that’s not centered around 11AM Sunday morning.

But the early church and today’s persecuted church would have an equally hard time conceiving a way of being Christian that is centered around 11AM Sunday morning!

For them, church is born in families and households. Worship is centered in families and households. The church meets all together when conditions permit–which in some countries like North Korea these days is literally, well, never.

But far from making them weak and uncommitted, this decision that Sunday morning is not the center makes them stronger Christians than we are. Each family or household has to learn how to be the whole church to its members. As a result, for them, the main service of worship is family (or household) worship.

The lay church follows the same model. There’s still a Sunday gathering. But the purpose is twofold:

  • First, to assign a scripture and a song and a teaching for each family or household to master in their daily worship that week, and
  • Second, to make sure each family or household mastered the material assigned the previous week, by practicing it together.

That’s it. That’s the heart of what happens in a lay church gathering on Sunday.

You might think, “Why do the Sunday gathering at all? It seems like the church could function without it.” And if you find yourself thinking that, you’re on the right track! The lay church has to be able to function fully even when it can’t get together on Sunday—because in countries where Christians are persecuted, that first Sunday gathering may not come until the day Jesus returns.

But when we can gather together on Sundays, we definitely need to, as the author of Hebrews points out in Hebrews 10:24-25. Because when we get together, we can encourage each other and hold each other accountable. But what we’re encouraging and holding each other accountable to is being a comprehensive, tiny church in our own sphere of influence—family, household, neighbors, friends, co-workers, and the strangers God sends our way.

Daily household worship is super simple:

  • Leadership moves from person to person each day (or night), kids included. (How, where, and when else would they learn?)
  • The group (or individual or couple) sings the song that the lay church is learning that week. Same song each night that week—that’s how you learn it.
  • Then the leader for the night shares from memory the Scripture that’s assigned for the week. Everyone else has their Bibles open and keeps the leader on track.
  • Then it’s on into prayer time, where each person prays out loud, with the leader closing by leading everyone in the Lord’s Prayer and inviting everyone to share the peace of Christ (hug time—our youngest son’s favorite part).

The simpler the service, the greater the focus can be on the real purpose: helping each Christian grow to fullness in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

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How to Start a Lay Church, Principle I: Don’t Make it Easy to Get In

Posted on June 13, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Don’t set up silly human preconditions and barriers, either. But do make sure people are joining your lay church for the right reason, which is because they’re serious about growing to fullness in Christ. That’s what Jesus himself did, after all. In Matthew 16:24, he said, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”

A few weeks ago we had a handyman, Jeff, at our house giving us an estimate on some home repairs. Pretty quickly we learned that he was a Christian looking for a deeper experience of church than what he was used to. I spent more than two hours with Jeff talking about our .W congregation. He was clearly fascinated, and we ended our time with him pledging to come that Sunday.

Of course he never showed up.

What did show up that Sunday, though, was a fascinating excerpt in a book I was reading, a third century document called The Apostolic Tradition by Hippolytus. It sheds light on how the young, underground, persecuted church dealt with guests in the generations shortly after the apostles. This is what Hippolytus wrote:

Let those who will be brought newly to the faith to hear the Word be brought first to the teachers before the people arrive. And let them be asked the reason why they have given their assent to the faith. And let those who have brought them bear witness as to whether they are able to hear the Word. And let them be asked about their life: What sort is it?

It reminded me of how underground North Korean Christians respond even to family members who express an interest in learning more about Christ. In North Korea, as North Korea scholar Marcus Noland notes, “Newlyweds will not be informed about their spouse’s family’s religious practices for some time until sufficient trust has developed.” They’ll even sleep together before they’ll share their commitment to Christ!

What a far cry from how I approached handyman Jeff! Imagine how different our conversation would have been if I had said, “Jeff, in the early church, before individuals were invited to worship with a particular congregation, congregation leaders would visit them and talk about their lives and why they wanted to follow Christ. The goal was to make sure the church consisted only of people who were there to grow because they wanted to grow to fullness in Christ. So if you’re interested in getting involved in our lay church, the first step would be for me to drop by your house to meet you and your family and to learn about your lives and your interest in Christ.”

In a lay church, there’s no need to grow big in order to cover a pastor’s salary or get a building. So instead of begging people to come, we can treat attendance as a precious privilege, and we can personally visit with those who want to join—before they show up at church—in order to make sure they’re really serious about following Christ as part of the congregation.

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