LIDE Unpublished Book (Pt. 1)
Over a decade ago, I spent a year writing a book about the church I was co-pastoring with my ex-wife (Life in Deep Ellum). I had a ton of fun writing it, but also found that over time things kept evolving - both my views and our circumstances. I always mourned that my work never saw the light of day. Until now! I’ve decided to share snippets of it. Two disclaimers: 1) I am speaking only for myself and not for the organization that I’m no longer affiliated with, and 2) I don’t actually believe some of the things I wrote back then anymore. So please read it with those two factors in mind. Hope you enjoy!
This was the Introduction in its entirety.
“We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.”
~ C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm
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A former team member, Tanner, was invited to consult with a church in the Midwest. He had started out in the mega-church context, but now he was busy making no money helping plant a church in Texas. The other church wanted to bring him in to learn more about our efforts in Deep Ellum, an urban neighborhood near downtown Dallas. Specifically, the pastoral staff wanted to explore our “model” for building relationships within our community.
I wasn’t there, but as I have sat through many similar meetings, I imagine a spacious and soundproofed conference room with plush carpet. Central to the room is a thick mahogany table covered with a layer of glass - you know, to protect the rich wood from the water rings left by sweating cans of Red Bull. The swivel chairs situated around the table smell of synthetic leather. They comfortably lean back for occasions when the Executive Pastor gets too long-winded about the value of excellence. And there sits Tanner touting his shaved head and tattoo sleeves. His presence creates ironic juxtaposition in the otherwise pristine atmosphere.
The pastors begin the conversation with a simple question: “How do we engage our community?” Tanner considers their goal and responds with a diagnostic question: “Well, where do you guys live? How close are you to the homes and communities you are trying to impact?” The question seemed to ruffle feathers, adding even more tension to the air. So the pastors went rounds justifying why their homes stretched 20-40 miles from the communities they desired to engage.
Imagine with me, if we had put up a map and plotted where these pastors lived, we would have seen a glaring disconnect between their intentions to reach their context and where they had chosen to do life. “You see, our target audience isn’t just this community,” they reasoned, “it’s the whole metroplex.”
This is when the prophet side of me wants push back a bit. Since when do community and target audience mean the same thing? A community is a brick-and-mortar reality full of freckled faces and actual pain. A target audience is an abstraction of said community. A target audience doesn’t need real people. It just needs pie charts and vague generalizations about demographics. Corporations like Apple and Nike think in terms of target audiences, but does it then follow that churches should think the same way? The problem is that a marketing strategy for a target audience will likely sail over the heads of our surrounding communities. You can’t generalize a community. You have to get to know them.
I like to imagine that the Holy Spirit is constantly at work in our world, you know, like the Bible says he is. I imagine that if God looked at a map, he would see his Spirit covering entire neighborhoods, cities, even metroplexes. Think of his Spirit at work whispering guidance at a political rally or convicting sin to a gang of hipsters. He’s always at work.
But what if church leaders came up to the map and put pins down where we were at work? I sometimes wonder if there would be a disconnect. Would not our ministry efforts consolidate around a single building rather than a community? Would not that building primarily be operational only on weekends? And wouldn’t it be haunting to see all the empty space between our building and the surrounding community where the Holy Spirit has clearly staked a claim?
This represents one of the many downsides of our established Christian sub-culture: disconnection and isolation. We establish nice buildings for our church, a place for visitors to become disciples, but over time the structure we use to attract our target audience becomes a barrier to engaging community. We find ourselves reduced to a bunch of people who worship in the same building rather than becoming unified in the Spirit’s work of engaging and impacting our neighbors with love and service.
And the cultural barriers are not limited to our architecture. It shows up in almost every cultural aspect that matters - our art is different, our language seems foreign, our music requires a separate selection aisle at Barnes and Noble and its own awards ceremony on TV. It’s insane. On a personal note, despite being woefully monolingual, I’m told that one of the hardest nuances to learn when studying a foreign language is the the humor of another culture. Have you ever felt the need to explain Christian humor to someone else? Yeah, me too.
Of course, some will argue that the Church ought to stick out and be set apart. “We are a peculiar people,” the preacher will sometimes boast. But please do not misunderstand me. I do not criticize a difference in ethics or morality. That is often admirable and sometimes honors God. I just get worried that our zeal for holiness often makes our missional efforts infertile. What’s the point of being a life transformed by Jesus if the only people we can effectively share it with are people who suspiciously look and think just...like...me?
I’d much rather be incognito. Cultural camouflage.
Malcom Muggeridge, one of this century’s most renowned journalists, took an interest in seven men who embodied this ethos. He had originally thought that they simply represented seven men whose fascinating search for God had deeply impacted the world. However, when he was forced to convert their stories into a book (The Third Testament), he began to see a common thread that held them all together: “all quintessentially men of their time, they had a special role in common, which was none other than to relate their time to eternity.” He came to see them as God’s spies.
Spies don’t spend their lives at headquarters. They feel comfortable out in the mix of things. They live among the people, outside the high walls of our Christian sub-culture. Why? Because someone has to faithfully incarnate the Gospel in ways that speak to an ever shifting culture. This is why our staff thinks every pastor ought to stop thinking like a pastor and start thinking like a missionary. Make no mistake, missionaries still have to think like pastors. Missionaries also require skills of preaching and disciple-making. But on top of their pastoral hearts, missionaries intuitively know that their context influences their methodologies. They start with a blank canvas, build relationships, establish a rapport, and try to see things from the shoes of their irreligious friends.
So we begin our book with our philosophical starting point: our view of people. Then we get theological. Part one of this book explores our story and how our context literally forced us to ask new questions. In one sense, Deep Ellum was our tutor. Because this neighborhood would not respond to pre-packaged religion, we were forced to adapt to our environment and learned many valuable lessons in the process. We call this Flexible Ecclesiology. After evaluating our methodologies, part two explains our commitment to listening. Our world doesn’t neatly break down into teams of the good guys and the bad guys. So if connection with our surrounding communities matter, listening becomes paramount in order to shape our “outreach.” Communication is not only about what we say, it is about what others hear. We call it Empathetic Missiology. Lastly, part three is about relationships. Programs designed to enhance proselytizing often violate the most sacred parts of being human. In the church’s zeal to win souls, we simply overlook that the image of God is in every person...God made them first...and he loves them more than we do. Therefore, our faith often doesn’t relate to others because we’re too busy propagating our “wonderful solutions.” We try to reverse engineer salvation for people and forget that it isn’t even our job to begin with. We call this Patient Soteriology. For us, it’s been a learning process. And to be honest, we’re still learning.
That’s what this book is about. It’s about our story of missteps, frustrating lessons, and marrying our pastoral hearts to a new vision of missionary intuition. This is not a book of models. My instincts actually push against that word. Models feel lazy. They encourage the practitioner to apply a pre-manufactured blueprint without considering their unique context. A model feels like it disempowers me from doing the more important work of thinking, listening, and developing a consistent philosophy. So if you’re looking for a model, this ain’t the book for you. Instead, this is a book of principles - of asking good questions, of taking intelligent risks, of caring about those empty spaces on the map where the Spirit is waiting.