Heading now towards a vocational shift – Some key points in the early journey

So after 8 years in church planting and pastoring the church we planted, we announced last Sunday that we are moving on in roughly half a year’s time to the next part of the journey God has for us.

Here is the text of what I shared with our baylight family.  It’s been an anxious and unsettling feeling I’ve felt as of late.   Knowing that big change is ahead, but feeling as though there are things that need to happen beforehand.  There is a lot in US that needs to change to embrace a simpler life, to embrace life in a desert small-town, to embrace a spirituality that is more holistically relating to our King and a mode of mission/ministry that is more holistically pleading for the King’s presence to go before us every step we take.

I wanted to start chronicling the spiritual journey for our friends, so they can see the key points along the way.  It’s going to be long, but for any of you who want a summary of the past three plus years, here it is.

Journey marker #1 – Self-realization, repentance and Organic Church

Where does one begin?   The truth is, that it’s already begun.  It started when I realized that pastoring baylight had just become a job for me where I was clocking in and out — not asking God for big things anymore, not attempting and dreaming for more.  I had believed a lie that has been over my life for some time now since late high school that I would never amount to anything and always be mediocre.  So the safer thing — to protect from disappointment — was to not hope for and try for more.  Somehow, this crept in.  When I became aware of this dynamic three years ago, I repented for turning God into a 9-5 job.  I asked Him to bring the lost into my relational spheres.  I asked Him to show me how to make disciples in a way that was not about preaching and programming.  And that darned book, Organic Church, ruined my paradigm.   I told God that I was willing to re-learn… and to trust that He was the God of the Gospels: the same God as in the book of Acts.

THAT was the watershed moment for this journey — it was a spiritually forming, spiritually defining moment that whisked me out of everything I’ve been taught and that has been modeled to me in evangelical Christianity.   I had much UNlearning I needed to do from there out of self-constructs of who I am, self-constructs of what ministry is and how it is done, self-constructs of what church is by extension.

Our friends who were fellow leaders at baylight walked with us in this time as we read through Organic Church and The Shaping of Things To Come by Alan Hirsch and Mike Frost.   We didn’t know how to express and transition the things we were learning about missional living and spirituality.  And somehow, Ralph Neighbor’s Cell Group schema just didn’t go far enough in taking church out of a day, time and space and into a people with a calling.  So we fumbled through the dark — aware that the way things used to be were not good enough, but that we hadn’t yet discovered what the new thing was, nor even how to get there!  But thank God for these friends and leaders who were willing to walk into mystery for what they knew was right.

Journey marker #2 – Luke 10 friends and praying and living out Luke 10:2 together

The next key moment came when I met my good friend, Ross Rohde, and many others in our loose relational circle of Jesus-followers trying to experience Jesus as Lord of the Harvest in a Luke 10 way.  Through these friends and relational mentors, we journeyed into planting churches in a more organic way a la Luke 10′s person of peace pattern that Jesus taught the 12 and the 72.     And boy was that an eye opener!  I saw a demon-harassed man come to Christ and a church multiply from his house.  And I was quickly ushered into a whole new aspect of Christianity that seminary never prepared me for — nor churches in America: spiritual warfare and the thinning veil between the natural realm and supernatural in mission.    This group of friends turned into a bunch of missional networks or apostolic orders throughout the Bay area that journeyed together into a process of deconstruction and reconstruction.   And a few in our midst even saw 4th and 5th generation church planting happening that extended cross-culturally.  We learned and laughed together.

It was with these friends that we journeyed out of talking about church structurally and, instead, more functionally.  In particular, the Lord showed us it was more about making disciples than about planting churches.    And the Lord also showed us much about the fivefold gifting and understanding in community and through experience what apostolic, prophetic, evangelistic, shepherding and teaching look like and how they interrelate.   It was also fun seeing this group cross-pollinate with baylight.

Through this time, the Lord began showing me in particular that my heart was for the harvest and to experience Jesus as Lord of the harvest.   I felt like God had blown open the doors of a well-kept barn that represented traditional pastoral ministry and taken me into the feel, the smell, the look and the sound of the harvest field outside the well-manicured bales of hay in the barn.  Things out here were messier, but it was the HARVEST field!  It was the place where God’s missionary and creative heart was.   And for the first time, I was beginning to understand that it wasn’t about what happened in barns across the world that represented ministry and mission.  It was what was happening in the harvest fields themselves a la Luke 10:2.

Sadly enough, all my time and training as a traditional church pastor had taught me to avoid the harvest and spend time tending to the saved.  My most important “ministry days,” sadly enough, were times spent in isolation working on a Sunday message to “feed the flock.”  In the name of truth, the preaching of the gospel, biblical literacy, the confronting of post-modernity, leadership development and everything else that we culturally have come up with as a legitimate reason for that prioritization and detachment, I followed that advice for years.  And so a complete shift was necessary for me to be able to become a non-religious but spiritual person for the sake of reaching non-religious but spiritual people.  In fact, it was the first thing God challenged in me when I told Him I was open to relearning how to make disciples.   Like missionary Jesus and missionary Paul did, I had to build relationships with “good soil” people, had to hang out where they hung out, do the activities they did, and care about the things they cared about: i.e., become like one of them  for the sake of incarnational mission.   And I was shocked at how little overlap there was with the things that were culturally Christian.

This transition into a missional lifestyle was stretching, but something the Lord told me I ABSOLUTELY HAD TO LIVE OUT IN FRONT OF my friends at baylight as well as my friends who shared a similar heart but did not feel as much freedom in their contexts to pursue.  So I did.  It came at a cost relationally (as I began “shepherding” baylight less) as well as in my own personal and family.  But it was well worth it because it was what God was asking of me.  And the great thing was that a good number of people also journeyed with us.  I thank God for all these people as well who were our companions and cheerleaders in this very busy time.

Journey marker #3+  - The Listening Gathering friends and what God showed us in various cities

The Lord brought more friends and mentors our way through the Listening Gathering of seasoned Organic Church Movement leaders.  And for reasons that were entirely God (and revealed later), the Lord put us in contact with these friends who made a significant impact on us.  Through them we went deeper in the journey.  We learned more about the five-fold giftings of Ephesians 4:11 — specifically about Apostolic and Prophetic pairs as foundation layers where the gospel has not been established.  We learned about spiritual authority and what makes someone powerful in the hands of a powerful God.  We learned about hearing from God and the importance it plays in mission and apostolic action.  And we also learned about Kingdom living and natural design.

We learned all of this through conversations, through seeing it modeled, through participating in exercises and “doing the stuff” — whether it was spiritual mapping, identificational repentance, prophetic actions, prayer-walking, decommissioning demonic strongholds/gates.   I realize that some of this stuff is Pentecostal-crazy sounding or sounds Martian to some, but it was all so real.  And we did those things in real cities like Colorado Springs, like Gl0be, AZ, or Basel, Switzerland, or Dallas/Plano, and soon to be Antioch/Ankara, Turkey.   And in some of those places, there is documentable and tangible evidence of real transformation — Gl0be being the best example.   We saw how unseen governing authorities in the spiritual realm could lay hold over towns,  families and regions.  For example, in Globe a spirit of death rooted in sin in a locale in a certain time past but expressed its dominion in a string of strange suicides among young high schoolers.   We started noticing things like the past sins of the land, idols, and such.  And the Lord began to download supernatural insight into the past and important places that needed to be prayed over, strongholds that needed to be destroyed and actions that needed to happen.

My world of “truth” and orthodoxy was impotent in the face of all this.  My inherited theological grid didn’t even have this stuff on the map.  Nor did my two Masters’ degrees prepare me for the spiritual warfare that we would experience as we began to enter into this lifestyle.   In future posts, I will illuminate more of this journey for any who are interested.  But, Ephesians 6:10-20 — which N.T. scholar-missionary, Peter T. O’Brien, calls “Paul’s Great Commission” came alive for me while on this journey.  What does Kingdom warfare look like using Kingdom means and weapons?  Who are we fighting anyway?  And what are we to do in the wake of this raging battle? For any who are truly seeking these answers, you cannot find them without being willing to let go of the control and relinquishing the order and the neatness that comes with inherited cultural Christianity.  I realized how Modernist my understanding was of this passage; it was an understanding that made no room for the supernatural — which clearly is the gist of Ephesians 6:10-20.  Ironic, but true to experience.

I’ll share two more moments related to this phase in the journey when I illuminate what happened in Basel in a future post AND what happened in Globe.  Those are significant enough that they deserve their own attention. There is a lot about Gl0be that we have not yet shared — its future and possibilities, its transformation over the last year and the shifting spiritual authority that shows itself in the natural realm too, its prophetic importance for the gl0be on the whole.   When the time comes to share about it, we will.

Journey marker #4 – Africa

What happened to me in Kenya this past June of 2009 was the culmination of all these currents.   All the things that God had been teaching me and reinforcing in me measure by measure found expression in Africa, where God had arranged for me to build an apostolic foundation among Ethiopians in a refugee camp who knew very little about God.  It was an important moment b/c I had to crystalize what I was about and who I was.  Would I simply repeat what others have taught and shared, or would I trust that God had already given me the resources and realities I needed?   It meant the embracing of spiritual authority that came forged out of life surrender and acceptance of what God was giving and calling out.  It meant the final releasing strike on the demonic stronghold over my life that lulled me into small hopes and dreams of a “successful ministry.”  So the four day training in Kenya was a “laboratory” where I tested out all the things I’ve espoused, become convicted of, and written blog postings and papers on.  About “being different enough to make a difference” as my friend, Dezi, puts it, and about doing ministry in an entirely different way.  And when I put it all on the line, God showed up.  And he showed up in a dramatic way.

Africa was a validation and a reminder to me that God has called ordinary people to great things if they’re willing… and both the medium and message were in correspondence that trip.  It was REAL and transferable.  And Africa was a reminder to me that I am not called to be mediocre, but if I was willing to “step up to the table” and accept my God-given destiny, then God was willing to show me “how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

Had Africa not happened, I’m not sure I would be up for this move to Globe now.  But thank the Father that it did.

One  other  important piece that came out of my trip to Kenya was a new “compass” the Lord gave me.  Before, I would ask the more direct and conversation-shortening questions like “Is this what you want, Lord?” and “Where do you want us to live?” The Lord told me that I was asking the wrong questions!  And that, instead, I should be asking, “What kind of life do I want to live?”  ”What spiritual legacy do I want to leave behind to my children and spiritual children and the generations that follow them?” When I answer these questions, the where questions won’t matter as much and will fall in line to the more important guiding questions.   What do I want? That requires active praying, listening, dreaming, thinking, dialoging.  The other is a simple “yes” or “no” question. It’s as though God threw the ball back to me after I told him “Get back to me when you’re ready; call me!” and he responded with, “What do you want written on your gravestone?” One is passively open and the other, actively seeking.  And God did not so much call me out, so much as he invited me to dream.  I have not finished processing this question, but they say good answers need good questions.  And I know God has given me one in this.

Journey marker #5 – Gl0be, AZ

Being written.

Thank you for your friendship through parts of this journey.  Where would we be without you?