Missional Shift or Drift? - Christianity Today

In the summer of 2000, Mike Lueken had every reason to be proud as a pastor of Oak Hills Church in Folsom, California. Every Sunday, thousands of people flocked to Oak Hill’s sixteen acre campus with its 35,000-square-foot facility, and the church was doing everything that a thriving, suburban megachurch with a $2 million budget was supposed to do. But then Lueken took a class at Fuller Seminary taught by Dallas Willard. The experience led to a complete change of course for him and Oak Hills Church.

“[Willard] was teaching on the Sermon on the Mount and conveying the heart of the gospel through Jesus’ teaching, and I felt I was sitting there listening to something I’d never heard before,” Lueken recalls. “We realized that we had to rethink what the gospel was about. Does the Bible teach only the gospel of heaven and forgiveness of sins? Or is it about a new way of living that involves the power of God, the peace of God, along with your sins being forgiven and going to heaven when you die?”

Lueken’s story illustrates the change occurring among today’s pastors, change that reflects new—or renewed—interest in a fuller picture of the gospel and in a sense of mission.

In order to gain a better understanding of these changes, Leadership conducted a survey in May 2008 asking nearly 700 evangelical pastors how their perceptions of the gospel and mission currently compare with their understanding a decade ago. The results clearly indicate that pastors’ attitudes and beliefs are shifting.

What the survey actually says

The survey was designed to uncover movement, not simply raw numbers, and this is important when analyzing the data. When asked if “the kingdom of God is a present reality, a future reality, or both,” 37 percent of pastors said they currently believe the kingdom is a future reality in heaven, 20 percent said the kingdom is a present reality on earth, and 33 percent said both. But 58 percent said that ten years ago they believed it was a future reality, and only 9 percent said they believed ten years ago that it was a present reality. The movement is clearly toward understanding the kingdom as a present, earthly reality, even if it remains a minority view. Here are more trends uncovered by the research. Compared to ten years ago:

Pastors are focusing more on the Gospels than on the Epistles.
More pastors believe the gospel is advanced by demonstration and not simply proclamation.
More pastors say the goal of evangelism is to grow “the” church rather than to grow “my” church.
More pastors believe partnering with other local churches is essential to accomplishing their mission.

The typical survey respondent was a white male pastor in his 50s, with an average church size of about 400 people, with about twenty years of pastoral experience.

The Christian life has to be demonstrated, not just explained.

Leadership spoke with numerous church leaders to examine these results. And most were not surprised by the shifts.

Scot McKnight, professor of biblical and theological studies at North Park University in Chicago and popular blogger (JesusCreed.org) said that he considers the survey results “very good news. The shifts have actually been going on for maybe 25 or 30 years. There has, though, been a surge in the last ten years. Evangelicals rediscovered the Gospels, and began to reframe their understanding of the gospel in terms of the Kingdom and not just justification.”

At the same time church leaders were becoming more biblically aware, they also were becoming more globally aware.

David Platt, the 29-year-old senior pastor of The Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham, Alabama, spent time in Honduras seven years ago and found himself at a spiritual turning point.

“Something happened to me there,” he said. “I started wrestling with how I reconcile my life with the needs in the world.” That trip began a series of international journeys, such as his time visiting a seminary in Indonesia. In order to graduate, every student in that seminary had to have planted one church in a Muslim community that had at least 30 new believers. “Two of their classmates died in the process,” Platt said. “Whether it’s there, or in an underground house church in Asia, or with brothers and sisters in war-torn Sudan, I came back to an American church culture that simply valued bigger budgets and buildings. There was a disconnect.”

Other disconnects began for pastors who seemingly had everything on track. Keith Meyer, executive pastor of Church of the Open Door in Maple Grove, Minnesota, remembers that at a previous church post, “although I was claiming and intending to win people to Christ, I was really ministering to my ego needs and people-pleasing and ambition. That can look really good, and the church can even do good things. But I found that my life was really no different from my neighbor’s.”

Whatever the particular cause for the shift in these pastors’ ideas regarding the gospel and mission, five changes are gaining momentum in congregations all across the country:

Affirming the whole gospel
Not looking to a megachurch model
Focusing on making disciples
Encouraging a missional mindset as a means of spiritual formation
Establishing partnerships to advance the gospel.

From proclamation to demonstration

A consistent theme emerging from the survey is the belief that previous descriptions of the gospel were incomplete. “We have emphasized that you pray a prayer and you’re saved, to our detriment,” says Platt. “Matthew 7 haunts me. To many the Lord will say, ‘I don’t know you.’ I want people to know the gospel fully, that the reality of what happens at the point of conversion is the beginning of a process in which we experience the fruit of Christ in us.”

The Kingdom isn’t a program, but men and women radically living for Christ.

Meyer agrees that too often the gospel has been inadequately expressed. “When you get the proclamation of what the gospel really is, not the consumer gospel that says ‘take care of the church and we’ll take care of you,’ when the gospel is faithfully and truly taught, that Jesus is Lord and he is making all things right, that’s when people really get impacted with the Kingdom.”

Expressing the gospel correctly, however, is just one part of what these pastors would like to see happen within their churches. Equally important is the need to demonstrate the power of the gospel to change lives, first within themselves, then within their congregations, and finally beyond their churches in the wider world.

Increasingly, justification is seen as just the beginning of a journey in which a Christian grows and deepens his or her walk with God through serving and loving other people, particularly those on the margins of society.

Meyer says, “The gospel is both proclamation as well as demonstration. The Christian life is a life that has to be demonstrated, not just explained but actually seen. The only way that can be done is in life-on-life organic relationships, not just in artificial programs of the church. It’s something that is caught.”

From mega to mini

In 2007, the Willow Creek Association released a study entitled “REVEAL: Where are You?” a survey of more than 400 churches representing hundreds of thousands of church attendees. The findings were surprising enough that even the Wall Street Journal took notice. Dale Buss wrote:

“This shift constitutes a megadevelopment in the world of megachurches. For over 30 years, Willow Creek grew explosively thanks to its obliqueness toward Sabbath-day orthodoxy and quickly became the standard-bearer of a powerful new movement in evangelical Christianity. Thousands of churches sprang up in its wake and grew the same way. But recent market research showed Willow Creek’s leadership that some great weaknesses lay beneath the surface even while average weekend attendance had grown to 23,000 people. Too many of their flock, Mr. Hybels and his staff discovered, considered themselves spiritually ‘stalled’ or ‘dissatisfied’ with the role of the church in their spiritual growth, and huge portions of these groups were considering leaving Willow Creek because of it” (Wall Street Journal, July 27, 2008).

What Willow discovered, and what many other pastors are realizing, is that building a church with quality programming to increase numerical growth does not guarantee spiritual depth and often leads to the burnout of its pastors. In addition, the current generation of young adults is not as enamored with the programs offered by these seemingly successful churches.

David Fitch, pastor of Life on the Vine in Long Grove, Illinois, and author of The Great Giveaway (Baker, 2005) says that “the megachurch phenomenon was about fitting church into an increasingly suburban society. That kind of church became very successful, playing off all the people who had wandered away in the 1960s. But people who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s are saying, ‘I want something real that affects my whole life.'”

Many pastors interviewed for this article told stories of the temptations and dangers of trying to grow a really large church, and of their subsequent shifts to create smaller, nimbler churches (plural).

Oak Hills’ Lueken says, “It wasn’t too long ago that pastors were taught to break the next numerical barrier. But we learned that we could have a church with more people, more money, and a more contagious buzz, but people weren’t necessarily becoming disciples of Christ.”

Dave Lewis, founding pastor of CORE Church in Troy, New York, says, “In seminary I was taught to do things the old way where you meet in a building and try to attract people to come through your programs. But the old way is not working anymore.” Instead, Lewis decided to focus on building a strong community with intentional outreach to the inner city of Troy. “Everyone said I was nuts, going somewhere where no one else wanted to go. But I wanted to get back to the foundation of what church was supposed to be. We have unruly, undisciplined kids in our church who come in cursing, and we have people with mental illnesses. We welcome them and accept them for who they are.” Lewis believes that his church’s smaller size is an advantage. “Something small and simple is more easily reproducible than something large and complex. It is easy to replicate a 30-50 person church with a community environment.”

From programs to people

Another shift is the growing emphasis on spiritual maturity, not just conversions. Pastors surveyed are pouring more energy into disciple-making even at the expense of programs previously considered sacred cows. For The Church at Brook Hills’ Platt, disciple-making is at the core of the church’s vision.

“We are trying to take everything we’ve been doing and focus on one thing, which is to make disciples of all nations,” he said. For example, the church recently cut its long-established Vacation Bible School program, and instead did more than 50 backyard Bible clubs all across the city.

“We’ve learned that we don’t have to bring people into a building to accomplish our mission,” he said.

“We are trying to help people follow the life of Jesus and not just his doctrines,” said Meyer.

He makes a regular practice of asking questions such as, “What is your experience with worry? Fear? Lust? What kind of intercessory prayer life do you have? Who are your non-Christian friends? What kinds of relationships do you have?”

Meyer feels that open dialogue is essential for making disciples and that it is all too absent in many churches today.

“My ministry used to be, ‘Here are five things to know, four things to do, take your devotions and call me in the morning,'” he said. “It was head knowledge, with applications that didn’t result in any heart change.”

One of the by-products of this focus on disciplemaking is the realization that it is not only the church leaders who bear the responsibility for proclaiming and demonstrating the gospel. Everyone is to be empowered, thus shifting the emphasis from the “alpha leader” to the priesthood of all believers.

“The pastor is now a subcategory of the church,” said Dave Gibbons, pastor of NewSong Church in Irvine, California. “I am now thinking about how to gear everything so that the laity is leading. It’s all about how to make our congregation feel as though they are the leaders of the church as opposed to the pastoral staff.”

For Life on the Vine’s Fitch, this de-emphasis on the professional pastor makes sense. Instead of needing to have more funds to pay full-time staff, his church seeks pastors who earn their living elsewhere. “We tell most of the church planters we are preparing to be bi-vocational and to do it with five to ten other people who are bi-vocational. They live in proximity to one another; it looks like a missional order.”

“The Kingdom of God is not advanced by programs or budgets,” Platt says, “but by men and women who are radically surrendered to Christ.”

He recounts the story of a couple in his church who led a group to Peru to minister to pastors and their wives. After returning home the same group started a ministry for Hispanics in Birmingham and mentored those couples as well. “That’s just one couple’s life. Imagine what happens when that becomes the reality in 4,000 peoples’ lives. Multiplication of the gospel happens when the church is seen as God’s people and they are unleashed.”

From Sunday to everyday

Compared to ten years ago, today’s pastors say they increasingly see disciple-making and meaningfully engaging the world as not merely ancillary expressions of faith, but the means through which spiritual formation occurs.

For Eugene Cho, founding pastor of Quest Church in Seattle, engaging with the needs of the city is a key part of spiritual growth.

He describes the Sunday service at Quest as very simple: “We don’t put on a big show. We gather, we sing, we read the Scripture and teach, and then we have communion. People may come because of our Sunday service, but that is not why they stay.

“Our engagement with the poor, our social services, the way we engage culture through our non-profit café, these are the things people talk about. They see that there is a genuine attempt to live out the gospel.”

Larry Grays, pastor of Midtown Bridge Church in Atlanta, whose congregants are mostly urban professionals between 20 and 40 years old, has learned that his people want more opportunities to serve the community around them. As a result, Sunday mornings have become less important as the emphasis shifts to inculcating a mentality that service should be a seven-days-a-week commitment.

“Sunday morning is not what church is about,” says Life on the Vine’s Fitch. “It’s a place to be shaped by God to be the church in the world. Hopefully people get that our service isn’t about getting what you need to be a better Christian. It’s about being in each other’s lives and living communally in the world.”

Gibbons agrees. “We are moving from a Sunday experience to an everyday experience. How has this affected our time and the management of our resources? I have told our staff that at least half of our time has to be focused on personal training. I don’t mind anymore if some of our programs aren’t as snazzy.”

From competition to cooperation

Another shift evident in the Leadership survey is the growing belief that partnerships are a critical means by which churches can reach their communities with the gospel. At Grays’s church in Atlanta, partnerships abound with numerous other Christian and secular entities.

“We partner with Bank of America to feed the homeless each month. We partner with other churches every month to do a House of Prayer, and in fact before we even planted the church, every person in the Atlanta phone book had been prayed for by ourselves and our partner churches,” Grays said.

As his is still a fledgling church, only a year old with 100 people, it depends heavily on the participation and support of its partners, a symbiotic relationship that ultimately benefits all involved.

“Our partners get as much if not more than what they put in,” Grays explains. “One of our partner churches is giving us $1,000 a month for the next three years, as they want to use us as an avenue for their people to be mobilized for missional activity. Their people come and help us in the city, then they go back to their churches and spread their new excitement for serving.”

For NewSong, which has established sister congregations both locally in Southern California and globally in Bangkok and Mexico City and elsewhere, partnerships are a key component to its ability to minister effectively.

“When you go overseas, what works in the western world does not necessarily work in the eastern world,” Gibbons says. “We tend to be patronizing, thinking that we know more, but often it’s the locals who know more, and we need to partner with the government, with educational institutions, or other organizations instead of going alone.”

He cautions, however, that churches need to be careful with their motivations for building partnerships. “Is it just about trying to grow your own local assembly?” he asks. “As opposed to going out and loving people and not getting any credit for it? When we do global work, one of our core principles is we want the locals to get credit for it.”

Caution ahead

Pastors interviewed for this article expressed notes of warning that we not be too reactionary in our opinions, resulting in healthy shifts becoming unhealthy overcorrections. For example, Jonathan Leeman, director of communications for 9Marks.org, an organization that helps churches develop biblical models of ministry, believes that a number of caveats need to be made before determining whether these shifts are good.

Regarding whether pastors should focus more on the Gospels versus the Epistles, Leeman says, “Narratives communicate truths in one fashion and Epistles in another. But you need both.” He fears that the church may capitulate to the temptation to “downplay anything that distinguishes us from the world, anything that is not going to be popular. We must not downplay the harder, edgier doctrines such as God’s wrath or a robust understanding of sin.”

In the area of proclamation versus demonstration, Grays feels that pastors need to be careful not to overemphasize one at the expense of the other: “You have a hard time building a biblical case for demonstration evangelism. It’s really clear that proclamation is how people come to Christ. No one who sees the service we are doing says, ‘I want to get saved.’ There always has to be proclamation in the mix.”

Cho also warns pastors not to forget the importance of proclamation. “We shouldn’t let our conversation about needing more demonstration minimize the importance of proclamation. … We have to be careful not to be reactive. A pendulum swinging from one extreme to the other is not helpful.”

Perhaps the greatest challenge for today’s pastors comes in the form of a congregation that does not understand or support the leader’s changing perspective. The Leadership survey discovered that many pastors see a gap between their understanding of the gospel and church’s mission and the congregation’s view of the gospel and misison. We should expect leaders to be a few steps ahead of their people on these matters, but if pastors are too far ahead of their churches, it may lead to problems down the road. The painful story of the changes undertaken by Mike Lueken and the leaders at Oak Hills Community Church, first reported in the summer 2006 issue of Leadership, is instructive for every leader seeking to infuse their changing view of the gospel into a church accustomed to a different understanding.

Time will tell if the changes uncovered in the survey will be lasting, or if the pastors’ responses are indicative of a passing phase. But in the interim, Cho sounds a cautionary note for those who are either struggling in their church or, equally dangerous, riding on the wave of their perceived successes:

“It takes great courage to endure in a situation where you are proclaiming something new and people are not responding. It also takes great courage to bring change to an established, more institutionalized church. It is surprisingly tempting to just settle and coast.”

Helen Lee is co-editor and contributor to Growing Healthy Asian American Churches (IVP) and a lay leader at Parkwood Community Church in Villa Park, Illinois.