Ingredient Five: Illuminating Worship

Now I’m venturing into dangerous water–worship. Opinions are strong about what kind of worship is best, right, and even permissible in the church. And we all have our cultural and personality-based preferences. But I can best describe my bent as illuminating. By that I don’t mean theatrical lighting and lasers. I mean worship that illuminates a vision of who God is and the reality of his presence with us.

Ideally worship at Church³⁶⁵ would not be where people come to be “filled up” for the next six days, but where we gather to see the cosmos as it really is–a God-with-us world in which Christ is reigning. Everything would be positioned to help us see this reality and diminish the false visions we’ve ingested…

Ingredient Four: Decentralized Service

Over the last few years my travels have been taking me more regularly to Portland, Oregon. Portland is weird, and that’s how they like it. But it’s also inspiring. I’m thinking of Rick McKinley and his church Imago Dei. Rick and the leaders at Imago have done a great job inspiring their people to serve the community in Portland. But when members of the church approach a pastor about starting a new ministry, Rick has trained them to always say the same thing: “No.”

I know, it sounds counter-intuitive, but there is brilliance behind the madness. Leaders at Imago Dei know that in most cases there is another church, agency, or non-profit already engaged in the work. So rather than reinventing the wheel…

Ingredient Three: Vocational Discipleship

Last month I met with David Kinnaman, president of The Barna Group, to discuss our new books. He wanted to talk about how the themes in my book With: Reimagining The Way You Relate To God fit with the research he lays out in You Lost Me: Why Young People Are Leaving Church…And Rethinking Faith. Central on David’s mind was rediscovering a theology of vocation. Here’s a quote from his book that articulates the problem:

For me, frankly, the most heartbreaking aspect of our findings is the utter lack of clarity that many young people have regarding what God is asking them to do with their lives. It is a modern tragedy. Despite years of church-based experiences and countless hours of Bible-centered teaching, millions

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Ingredient Two: Cultural Flourishing

As I discussed in my first book, The Divine Commodity, when church institutionalism grows out of control, we come to believe that programs rather than people are the vessels of God’s Spirit and mission in the world. When this occurs we begin to honor people for their involvement in, or service for, the church. But what they do with the remainder of their time gets little attention. When this assumption is reinforced over decades, a hierarchy of importance is established with church leaders (pastors and missionaries) at the top. Others are then only celebrated when they behave like pastors or missionaries, or when they leave their “worldly” professions to devote themselves to “full-time Christian service.”

What I’m describing is the contemporary Western church’s abandonment…

A few weeks ago I had lunch with Darren Whitehead from Willow Creek. Darren is a great bloke (I can say that because he’s an Aussie), and we talked candidly about our experiences in the church, in leadership, and the way we see church adapting to the shifting culture. Toward the end of our lunch he asked me if I’d ever considering working on a church staff again. “I’ve learned never to say never,” I replied, “but it would have to be a very different kind of church.”

“Like what?” he asked. I rattled off some half-baked answer, but his question has lingered in my mind. What kind of church would I want to help lead?

As I’ve ruminated on that question, I’ve gone back and read a…

Back in March I was in New York City doing some scouting work for This Is Our City, a new project Andy Crouch is leading for Christianity Today. While in town I stopped by to visit with Gabe Lyons and the crew behind Q. In our conversation Gabe asked me about my new book, With. It was still about six months away from being released, but I shared the main concept of the book with him. Gabe responded by saying he’d love for me to share those ideas at the Q Gathering. We had just finished talking about the 2012 Q Gathering in Washington D.C., so I told Gabe I’d be happy to speak at the conference. “No,” he said, “I want you to share this in…

Last week was the Willow Creek Association’s Global Leadership Summit. The annual conference is a convergence of business, government, social, and church leaders curated by the WCA and headlined by Bill Hybels. Past Summits have featured speakers like Bill Clinton, Jack Welch, and Bono. But the buzz surrounding this year’s lineup (or “faculty” as the WCA likes to call them) was focused on who would not be there.

Days before the event Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz withdrew because of an online petition launched by Change.org. The gay-advocacy group accused Willow Creek of being anti-gay and threatened to boycott Starbucks if Schultz spoke at the Leadership Summit. The controversy was widely reported in the press, and as 165,000 people gathered at 450 locations around the world for the WCA…

Back in college my professor of American religion gave us an interesting assignment. We had to visit a number of local churches, sit in their sanctuaries, and write down our observations of the spaces. Based on these observations, we were to deduce the theological beliefs of each congregation. How were the seats arranged? What was the visual focus of the space? Why did the Presbyterian church have a soaring pulpit? Why did the Episcopal church have a baptismal font at the entrance? (The most intriguing churches were ones where their explicit theology did not conform to the implicit theology communicated by their space.)

Because of this assignment I was intrigued (and rather proud) when I discovered my 9-year-old daughter conducting a similar exercise. Zoe has joined me at…

I like airplanes, and given the amount I travel that is a good thing. Seeing these incredible machines–aluminum and composite monuments of human ingenuity–makes the atrocities of most American airports almost bearable. (My genetically tanned, ambiguously ethnic appearance must scream “al-Qaeda!” I get patted down more than Donald Trump’s mane on a windy day.)

Modern airliners, as one author put it, are “the most complicated machines man has ever built.” But they are still regarded as the safest form of transportation. There are over 20,000 commercial flights every day in the United States. If you were to drive rather than fly one of those routes, you would be 65 times more likely to be killed. Perhaps more surprising, since 1980 the number of airplanes, flights, and passengers has…

Last week the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist, gathered for its annual meeting in Phoenix. The media pounced when stats were released indicating SBC membership had shrunk for the fourth consecutive year. In addition (or should I say subtraction), the number of baptisms declined by over 17,000 in 2010 compared to 2009. This is the eighth drop in 10 years.

Ed Stetzer, president of LifeWay, was honest about the statistics. “This is not a blip. This is a trend. And the trend is one of decline,” he said.

Read more from the report on the SBC.

The news about the SBC’s decline swirling around both the secular and Christian media only adds to the dismay in recent years. It seems like every time I logon there…