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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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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