The Good God: Michael Reeves

Introduction:

C.S. Lewis was wrong... the oft quoted story about C.S. Lewis' bold declaration that 'grace' is the one thing that makes Christianity different from all other world religions is wrong. Michael Reeves points out that actually it's 'Trinity' (which is still one word).

The Protestant Buddhists
Francis Xavier was a Roman Catholic Missionary to Asia. When he reached Japan in 1549 he came across a particular sect of Buddhism (Yodo Shin-Shu) that stank, he said of what he called 'The Lutheran heresy'. That is, like the Reformer Martin Luther, these Buddhists believed in salvation by grace alone and not by human effort. Simple trust in Amida, they held, instead of trust in self, was sufficient to achieve rebirth into the pure land. If we call on him, they taught, then despite our failings, all his achievements become ours.
Of course the 'salvation' in view here was nothing like Christian salvation: it was about enlightenment and the achievement of Nirvana. It was, nonetheless, a salvation grounded on the virtues and achievements of another, and appropriated by faith alone.
We need not be disturbed by such similarities. That which distinguishes Christianity has not been stolen. For, what makes Christianity absolutely distinct is the identity of our God... the bedrock of our faith is nothing less than God himself, and every aspect of the gospel - creation, revelation, salvation - is only Christian in so far as it is the creation, revelation and salvation of this God, the triune God.

The above quote is interesting and a good reminder that we needn't be so afraid of celebrating the uniqueness of Christian faith. I think that the belief in a Tri-une God is quite obviously something that distinguishes us from all and any other faith but it is also the thing we're least (read I) likely to talk about since it seems a rather embarrassing and illogical idea. Reeves goes on to helpfully say:

Can we rub along with just 'God'?The temptation to sculpt God according to our expectations and presuppositions, to make this God much like another, is strong with us. You see it all down through history: in the middle ages it seemed obvious for people to think of God as a feudal lord; the first missionaries to the Vikings thought it obvious to present Christ as a warrior God, an axe-wielding divine berserker who could ou-Odin Odin. And so on. The trouble is, the triune God simply does not fit well into the mould of any other God. Trying to rub along with some unspecified 'God', we will quickly find ourselves with another God.

That, ironically, is often why we struggle with the Trinity: instead of starting from scratch and seeing that the triune God is a radically different sort of being from any other candidate for 'God', we try to stuff Father, Son and Spirit into how we have always though of God.   

What was God doing before Creation?

We are to understand God not in terms of 'creator' or 'almighty' that is by reference to what he does but in terms of who he actually is, the loving relational and triune God who has always existed and always will exist. He is not, as Aristotle, described him 'the Uncaused Cause' but he is Father, Son and Spirit and getting a glimpse into their relationship means that we are better positioned to know him and live in relationship with him.

God does not need us, he did not create us to keep him company. One danger of describing God simply in terms of what he does 'Lord, Ruler, Creator' is that it can imply that he needs something to be Lord over and Rule or create. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Swiss theologian Karl Barth put it starkly:

Perhaps you recall how, when Hitler used to speak about God, he called him 'the Almighty'. But it was not 'the Almighty' who is God; we cannot understand from the standpoint of a supreme concept of power, who God is. And the man who calls 'the Almighty' God misses God in the most terrible way. For 'the Almighty' is bad, as 'power in itself' is bad. The 'Almighty' means Chaos, Evil, the Devil. We could not better describe and define the Devil than by trying to think this idea of a self-based, free, sovereign ability.' Mere might is not all God is.

Quotes from this chapter:

In other words, I can never really love the God who is essentially just The Ruler. And that, ironically, means I can never keep the greatest command: to love the Lord my God. Such is the cold and gloomy place to which the dark goat-path takes us. 

That is who God has revealed himself to be: not first and foremost Creator or Ruler, but Father.

Quoting Athanasius in his debate with Arius over the nature of God (4thC)

The right way to think about God is to start with Jesus Christ, the Son of God, not some abstract definition we have made up like 'Uncaused' or 'Unoriginate'  

With 'The Unoriginate' we are left scrambling for a dictionary in a philosophy lecture; with a Father things are familial. And if God is a Father, then he must be relational and life-giving, and that is the sort of God we could love.

The loving Father

Since God is, before all things, a Father and not primarily Creator or Ruler, all his ways are beautifully fatherly. It is not that this God 'does' being Father as a day-job, only to kick back in the evenings as plain old 'God'. It is not that he has a nice blob of fatherly icing on top. He is Father. All the way down. Thus all that he does he does as Father. That is who he is. He creates as a Father and he rules as a Father; and that means the way he rules over creation is most unlike the way any other God would rule over creation. 

It is only when we see that God rules his creation as a kind and loving Father that we will be moved to delight in his providence. 

A Father is a person who gives life, who begets children... this God is an inherently outgoing, life-giving God. He did not give life for the first time when he decided to create; from eternity he has been life-giving... love comes from God. Whoever does not love, does not know God. 

And just as a fountain, to be a fountain, must pour forth water, so the Father, to be Father, must give out life. That is who he is. If he did not love, he would not be Father.
If he created us in order to be who he is, we would be giving him life.

In Hebrews 1:3 it says that Jesus Christ, the son, is the radiance of God's glory and the exact imprint of his nature/being. The 4thC theologian Gregory of Nyssa explained this by likening it to the light that emanates from a lamp - I love this quote:

as the light from the lamp is of the nature of that which sheds the brightness, and is united with it (for as soon as the lamp appears the light that comes from it shines out simultaneously), so in this place the Apostle would have us consider both that the Son is of the Father, and that the Father is never without the Son; for it is impossible that glory should be without radiance, as it is impossible that the lamp should be without brightness.' 

The Son has his very being from the Father. In fact he is the going out - the radiance - of the Father's own being. He is the Son. 

A wonderful and extremely challengeing summary of marriage as it relates to the Trinity was also laid out. In just a few words he summed up, for me, what I think I ought to be working toward in my marriage:

That dynamic is also to be replicated in marriages, husbands being the heads of their wives, loving them as Christ the Head loves his bride, the church. He is the lover, she is the beloved. Like the church, then, wives are not left to earn the love of their husbands; they can enjoy it as something lavished on them freely, unconditionally and maximally... Such is the spreading goodness that rolls out of the very being of this God. 

The heavenly hodge-podge of modalism is what Reeves calls 'moodalism' three different moods of the one God. A great quote on this:

'The trouble is, once you puree the persons, it becomes impossible to taste their gospel.

St Hialrius (Hilary of Poiter)  said that:

Trying to define God without starting with the Father and his Son, he saw, one would quite simply wind up with a different God.

Mere Trinitarianism.

The Apostle John wrote his gospel, he tells us, so 'that you may believe that Jesus is the christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.'

John Calvin once wrote that 'if we try to think about God without thinking about the Father, Son and Spirit, then  only the bare and empty name of God flits about in our brains, to the exclusion of the true God.'  

This God simply will not fit into the mould of any other. For the Trinity is not some inessential add-on to God, some optional software that can be plugged into him. At bottom this God is different for at bottom, he is not creator, ruler, or even 'God' in some abstract sense: he is the Father, loving and giving life to his Son in the fellowship of the Spirit.

Creation: The Father's Love Overflows

The Father has always enjoyed loving another, and so the act of creation by which he creates others to love seems utterly appropriate for him.

Referring to Jesus' prayer in John 17:

The Father loved him before the creation of the world, and the reason the Father sends him is so that the Father's love for him might be in others also.

We have been created that, knowing his love, we might love the Lord our God.

It's all Greek to me:

Hypostasis - means something similar to 'foundation'
Hypo = under; Stasis = something which stands or exists.
LXX translates Psalm 69:2 when the psalmist says 'I sink in the miry depths, where there is no foothold (hypostasis).'
Hebrews 1:3 'The son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being (hypostasis).
The son is the exact 'foundation' of the Father.

Ekstasis (from which we get 'ecstasy') means to be beside yourself or outside yourself.
Ek = 'out from'; Stasis = something which stands or exists

What we have been seeing is that the Father, Son and Spirit have their hypostasis (foundation) in ekstasis (outside himself). That is, God's innermost being (hypostasis) is an outgoing, loving, life-giving being. The triune God is an ecstatic God.

The Father finds his very identity in giving his life and being to the Son; and the Son images his Father in sharing his life with us through his Spirit

God gives away - he is ecstatic:

The tragedy is that so many think that the living God is the devilish one here, as if her created us simply to get, to demand, to take from us. But the contrast between the devil and the triune God could hardly be starker: the first is empty, hungry, grasping, envious; the second is super-abundant, generous, radiant and self-giving

Grace then is not merely his kindess to those who have sinned; the very creation is a work of grace, flowing from God's love.

This God's very self is found in giving not taking.

His very nature is about going out and sharing of his own fullness, and so that is what he is all about... his pleasure 'is rather a pleasure in diffusing and communicating to the creature, than in receiving from the creature.'

In the sunshine of God's love: We become like what we worship

Richard Sibbes a Puritan preacher who spoke so winningly of God's kindness and love that he became known as 'the honey-mouthed' preacher. He saw God as winning, kind and lovely: he spoke of the living God as a life-giving, warming sun who 'delights to spread his beams and his influence in inferior things, to make all things fruitful.'

That is, God is simply bursting with warm and life-imparting nourishment, far more willing to give than we are to receive... the creation (he says) was a free choice borne out of nothing but love.

Wherever God's Spirit is, fruitfulness is the result, creation occurs as an overflow of the love and goodness of God.

In the book of Job Elihu says 'The Spirit of god has made me; the breath of the Almighty gives me life.' (Job 33:4) Ongoingly in his creation, the Spirit vitalises and refreshes. He delights to make his creation - and his creatures - fruitful. Isaiah writes of the time when 'The Spirit is poured upon us from on high and the desert becomes a fertile field, and the fertile field seems like a forest.' Is 32:15 The psalmist sings 'When you send your Spirit, they the creatures are created, and you renew the face of the earth.' Ps104:30

The supposed sexism in the Da Vinci Codes is simply wrong. Gnosticism has at its core the idea that the earth was created as an evil banished from the spiritual goodness that originally existed and that women, since they were created from the side of man, were similarly bad. On the other hand:

Studies have shown that in that world it was quite extraordinarily rare for even large families ever to have more than one daughter. How is that possible across countries and centuries? Quite simply because abortion and female infanticide were widely practised so as to relieve families of the burden of a gender considered largely superflous. No surprise, then, that Christianity should have been so especially attractive to women, who made up so many of the early converts: Christianity decried those life-threatening ancient abortion procedures; it refused to ignore the infidelity of husbands as paganism did; in Christianity, widows would be and were supported by the church; they were even welcomed as 'fellow-workers' in the gospel. In Christianity women were valued.

In the triune God is the love behind all love, the life behind all life, the music behind all music, the beauty behind all beauty and the joy behind all joy. In other words, in the triune God is a God we can heartily enjoy - and enjoy in and through his creation.

Philippians

Context:
The honour of being a provincial capital belonged to Thessalonica but Philippi had its own importance both past and present. Its name came from the father of Alexander the Great Philip of Macedon who captured the city in 360BC. In the early 1990s a tomb was found belonging to Philip that was full of gold. A find second only to that of Tutankhamen tomb in Egypt.

In recent years it was the scene of the decisive battle in which armies loyal to the murdered Julius Caesar (fighting under Augustus and M Anthony) defeated Brutus and Cassius. To honour this event the dignity of being a 'colony' was conferred on the city.

As a 'colony' Philippi was in fact 'Rome in miniature' In conferring on Philippi the ius Italicum Augustus bestowed a great honour on the town:

Ius Italicum (Latin, Italian or Italic law) was an honour conferred on particular cities of the Roman Empire by the emperors. It did not describe any status of citizenship, but granted to communities outside Italy the legal fiction that it was on Italian soil. This meant that it was governed under Roman rather than local or Hellenistic law, had a greater degree of autonomy in their relations with provincial governors, all those born in the city automatically gained Roman citizenship, and the city's land was exempt from certain taxes. As citizens of Rome, people were able to buy and sell property, were exempt from land tax and the poll tax and were entitled to protection by Roman law. (from Wikipedia)

Paul encountered in Philippi a community that had a pronounced pride and dignity from being a colony of Rome - essentially Rome away from Rome. The Romans divided the world up into two types of people, citizens and strangers. A colony was a city of citizens in a land of strangers.

Only in Philippians does he use language that speaks of civil or political identity. He tells them to 'live in a way that is worthy' of the gospel and he reminds them that their citizenship is in heaven. Paul is trying to get them to see themselves as Christians first and Romans second not Romans first and Christians second. Their higher allegiance and larger identity was to a ruler who is far greater than any Caesar.

Philippi is the location of Paul's first church plant and the first city he had visited in mainland Europe.

Town lies on the Via Egnatia a road that stretched from Albania, through northern Greece and into Turkey. It was a popular trading route.

Paul visited Philippi in 49/50AD and is recorded in Acts 16
Acts 16:10 - Macedonian call Paul's dream of a man begging saying 'come over to Macedonia and help us.' Philippi is described in A16:12 as 'a Roman colony and the leading city of that district of Macedonia.'
v12 - we stayed there several days.
v15 Lydia was converted after Paul and friends sat down and began speaking to some of the women at what they supposed was a place of prayer. They then stayed at Lydia's house. Although described as 'a dealer in purple cloth from the city of Thyatira' which is in Northern Turkey she had a 'house' in Philippi. Also in Philippi with her was her 'household' which could include anything from immediate family to employees/slaves.

Lydia’s hospitality may have even served as the catalyst for the generous, giving spirit of the new church Paul established in Philippi.Years later, when the apostle wrote to the Philippian church, he recalled their generosity at his initial meeting with them 4:15

v16 - 'once when we travelling to the place of prayer...' the word once  implies that they travelled there quite often. Following the fruit of seeing Lydia converted they saw it as an effective place to share the gospel. The fact that Luke doesn't mention what happened on all of the subsequent visits to the place of prayer by the river could suggest that not much of significance happened on those days. Although not necessarily as he is more giving us a highlight reel of what happened in response to God's leading.
v18 - 'she kept this up for many days' again seems to suggest that they were used to a similar strategy of visiting the place of prayer and talking to people. Paul was quite deliberate about what he did and where he went. He didn't simply start shouting in the streets to get people's attention. He found somewhere open and visited there regularly talking to people.
v32 - presumably then the jailer's household lived with him in the prison district.
v40 Paul and Silas have spent a night in jail where God used him in bringing the jailer to faith and the next day return to Lydia's house 'where they met with the brothers...' which is a generic gender neutral term to mean brothers and sisters. Just from the few people we've been told about Paul's converts included Lydia's house, possibly a slave girl (redeemed by Lydia perhaps?) and the jailer and his household.

1 Thess 2:2 Paul mentions that he was treated shamefully in Philippi referring perhaps to how he felt being assaulted as they were by the magistrates and the jailer.

It is supposed that Paul left Luke in charge of the converts since it is at this point that the narrative stops saying 'we' and returns again to 'they' once Paul and Silas leave. Luke then starts using 'we' again when Paul returns in 20:6 when he records 'we sailed from Philippi after the Feast of Unleavened Bread.' Phil Moore mentions that the difference in time between A16 and A20 is 4 years. If this is true then it seems that Luke was in Philippi for four years building with what Paul had got started after the 'Macedonian Call.' Some have even suggested that Luke was the 'Man form Macedonia'. In Colossians Luke is described as the beloved doctor and there was a school of medicine in Philippi. Perhaps Luke lived in Philippi.

5 church buildings have been excavated from the ruins of Philippi the earliest dating to 500AD.

The church started around 52AD

Themes of the letter:

Unity in the church - other than Epaphroditus Paul mentions only two Philippians by name - the quarrelling women Euodia and Syntyche. 'Once disposed of the news-sharing he abruptly plunges into a fresh topic: 1:27' Live worthy.

Under attack - the gospel is bearing fruit but it is also producing enemies. People opposed to Paul are preaching a gospel out of selfish reasons. The Philippians are also being 'frightened' by opponents of the gospel and it is into that that he writes in 2:1 'so/therefore' and then lists how the church can respond to the threats '...make my joy complete by being like-minded, of one spirit...' 'stand firm' against such opponents. Motyer writes 'there is an effective reply to a hostile world - a united church.'

The coming great day - the day of Christ's return is a day toward which the Father is working. Since the Father wants every creature without exception to own Jesus as Lord. To this end the Father is constantly engaged in the task of making Christian believers ready for the great day. The Lord's return is a day 'toward which every Christian must work.'

Since the Lord is at hand, the present duty of each Christian is to live in his likeness, to make urgent progress in holiness so as to have a harvest of righteousness ready for him, and to long to bring others to faith so that they may be glad together before his throne.

Three themes intertwine to make up the letter to the Philippians but the uniting factor is not any one of them but the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The church has caught the vision of Paul's gosepl preaching since they send him both a financial gift and a valued member of the church to be with him.

The letter is quite different to the others written by Paul. It doesn't concentrate on problems or crises but on relationships between Paul and the Philippians.

David Pawson points out that two main themes of the letter are: gospel partnership and joy. He also argues that Paul's joy comes from two main sources: 1) Because of what he lived for. 2) Because of what he lived on. The Philippians financial contributions were the only ones he received.

The major teaching of Philippians follows the poem about Christ's humiliation-come-glorifitcation. Those teaching themes are:
1) Redemption: an experience to apply
- God works it in
- You work it out
2) Righteousness: an end to pursue
- not ours
- but his
3) Resurrection: an event to desire
- out from the dead
- with a new body
4) Responsibility: an effort to make
- forgetting the past
- straining towards the future
5) Reproduction: an example to follow
- bad = earthly minded
- good = heavenly minded

Pawson's conclusion:
We have seen that the major thrust of the letter is not what the Lord does in the believer but what the believer needs to do in response.

Tom Wright:

- When people were put in prison in the ancient world they weren't usually given food, instead they had to rely on the kindness and support of friends. The fact that a group from another country would send money and support and one of their own on a dangerous journey speaks volumes of how they felt towards Paul.

In Paul's world the word 'partnership' would usually be used in the sense of a business. Partners in a business. It usually included a financial and practical element. The Philippians then are partners in the gospel and partners in grace. They are in the gospel business and the grace business.

Philippians: Changed Lives

Changed Lives - Sermon by Keller.

Philippi was perhaps the healthiest church that Paul planted.

Here's what we find: three absolutely different persons

Racially:
Lydia - Asia Minor in Turkey (Asian)
Slave girl - native Greek
Jailor - Roman
Asian, Greek, Roman

Economically:
Lydia - extremely wealthy. A dealer in dyes, a respected business with more than one house. She is like a successful fashion CEO. A person of power and influence. Homes in different towns - paris etc.
Slave Girl - Opposite end of the power spectrum. She is powerless, economically exploited
Jailor - not wealthy, not a mess like the slave girl. Blue collar, working class, ex-GI.

Analogous to...
Lydia - eating at Espinars, living on 5th Avenue
Slave Girl - prostitute controlled by pimps, living under the bridge
Roman jailor - guy living in Queens drinking at his pub

Utterly different worlds.

Rationally:
Different ways we learn - cognitive, intuitive and concrete relational
Cog - arguments, discussion, case, evidence
intuitive - experience, encounter
concrete relational - show me

Lydia wants a disuccion
Slave girl needs a powerful encounter
Jailor - impatient with argument and rationality and turned off by emotion, he doesn't want to talk, he wants to be shown something concrete (doesn't go to church)

Spiritually:
Lydia is empty. Lydia has achieved something that was hard for a woman back then but we're told she was a worshipper of God even though she was a gentile. Turned away from her pagan roots. She's seeking.
Slave Girl. Utterly out of control. Text doesn't say 'Spirit of prediction' text says 'Spirit of a python' We met a 'pythonas'. In Delphi (Southern Greece) the oracle of the temple could tell the future and the temple was guarded by a python.

Info from Wiki-

In Greek mythology, Delphi was the site of the Delphic oracle, the most important oracle in the classical Greek world, and a major site for the worship of the god Apollo after he slew the Python, a dragon who lived there and protected the navel of the Earth. Python (derived from the verb pythein, "to rot") is claimed by some to be the original name of the site in recognition of the Python that Apollo defeated.^[2] The Homeric Hymn to Delphic Apollo recalled that the ancient name of this site had been Krisa.^[3]

Because of the girls strange and awful behaviour her parents had sold her into slavery.
Servants of 'The Most High' gave them shudders because they knew their Bible - Isaiah 14 and account of how one of the great angels became Satan. Lucifer says 'I will be as the Most High'. The term 'The Most High' is the envious resentful way the Devil himself talks about God. She was in utter torment and yet was attracted to them. Spiritually in utter despair.

Jailor - no spiritual interest.

Lydia - knew about God from ehr studies
Slave girl - knew about God from her evil Spirit
Soldier - knew nothing and cared nothing

Totally different: in every possible way. Yet God comes after them. He comes after them in three completely different ways.

Lydia - through her mind - she knew something about the OT and that God had provided means for atonement. She was trying to live morally. She'd tried paganism and now she was trying Jewish morality. The Lord opened her heart. 'Proseko' - to 'get it'. God helped her 'get it.' How? Through a Bible study, through arguments and a seminar. Lydia did not know the gospel.

Slave girl - Paul doesn't say 'let's sit down and study the Bible'. She couldn't discuss it but she knew it and she hated the gospel. She was a slave on the inside to bad masters which made her slave on the outside to good masters. She encounters Jesus' greatness over her spiritual master. A power encounter, not a sweet little seminar.

Jailor - Jailor doesn't care. The jailor is reached. Jailor is told simply to 'keep them safe' but instead he puts them in the inner prison and puts their feet in stocks (a form of torture). God confronts him with two things. 1) The Roman jailor sees two men singing and praising in the middle of the night. He's never seen anyone with joy so deep they can still praise God in difficulty. 2) The presence of the prisoners after the Earthquake. The prisoners had his life in their hands. 'All I want to know is... where does this joy and conviction come from?'

They're all different on the outside but actually they're all similar - they're all slaves.
Jailor was going to kill himself because he's a slave to duty. His self-worth was gone and he was going to kill himself.
Lydia was a slave to wealth and yet she was empty.
Slave girl was a slave

The reason Paul and Silas's master impressed them was because they had the only slave master who forgives when you fail and who gives you a joy so deep you can sing even when your feet are in stocks.

The gospel is a divine power. The gospel is the greatest thing in the world to bring people together.

Paul as a Jewish male had been taught since birth to pray a prayer. Every time that he got up would have prayed a pray - O Lord I thank thee that I'm not a woman, a slave or a gentile. That's exactly who God led him to here in Philippi.

Do you want to be used in the gospel? Check your idols and make sure you're flexible and see that God will come after all kinds of people.


--

Fall short of the mark: Hebrew word for sin 'Hatah' which means 'to fall short fo the mark

To 'us' the message has come, we are in the people to whom the message has come.

1) AFFIRM the culture
2) CHALLENGE the culture
3) BETTER than the culture

Exponential: Missional Church

C1: You - The beginning of a movement
"You can do it."

The story of Community Christian Church
The three-phased vision for Community Christian Church.
1) Be an impact Church
We were never interested in reaching people who were al;ready attending church. Our mission statement was 'helping people find their way back to God.'
2) Be a reproducing Church
3) Be a catalyst for a movement of reproducing churches

Our mission:
Two numbers remind us of whom we are working to reach: sixty-seven and twenty. If the world were a village of a hundred people, sixty-seven would be far from God, facing a Christless existence. And twenty of the one hundred would be living in extreme poverty. It is our mission to reach the sixty-seven and come alongside the twenty, helping all people find their way back to God.

Getting started:
We had no money to speak of, no people to help us, and, truthfully, no clue what we were doing! We were true entrepreneurs.
Every day for four months straight, we knocked on doors, getting to know the people in our community. They knocked on over 5000 doors.
We asked people what they might look for in a new church. We asked them what they believed were the most significant needs in their community.
465 people came to their opening celebration service

Five reproducing principles we've learned
Reproducing small groups and services I cannot overstate the significance of insisting that every small group begin with a leader and an apprentice leader. Make sure that reproducing is at the very heart of everything you do, including the small groups. 
Even though we weren't seeing nearly as many people as we had hoped on weekends, that summer we made the decision to add a second service just six months after we launched.
1) Reproducing requires everyone to have an apprentice.
2) Reproducing is proactive, not reactive.
3) Reproducing is not about size; it's about leader readiness.
4) Reproducing isn't about our kingdom; it's about God's kingdom.
5) Reproducing happens on the edge and the centre.

C2: The leadership path

Movement = mass x velocity
If one person is moving in the right direction by the leading of the Holy Spirit, I call that 'spiritual velocity'. Everyone of us travels at a certain spiritual velocity, but to really gain momentum, you need to increase the mass. Movement is created when you influence other people to join you by inviting them to share life together and travel at a constant spiritual velocity... intentional leadership is required in order to influence the masses of people to live with any sort of spiritual velocity. 

Leadership pipelines: Individual - apprentice - leader - coach - director - planter
The goal of being an apprentice is that he would over time become a coach to others. Have I given thought to leadership progression or do I feel that 'leadership' is the end in itself?

It's a life-on-life relational process for apprenticing leaders in the Jesus mission.

stop right now and ask yourself who in your circle of influence you need to invite into the leadership path.

C3: Apprentice
The core competency of any movement is apprenticeship.  

Discipleship in the church today has more to do with consuming and absorbing cognitive content than it has anything to do with missional action. Being a disciple is more about an individual and his/her ability to get a passing grade on the subject matter,and less about being a follower of Jesus who lives in community with others for the sake of Christ's mission.

Ram Charan in his book 'Leaders at All Levels' - "Apprenticeship is at the heart of this new approach to leadership development. To understand why, you'll have to come to grips with a potentially controversial belief: leadership can only be developed through practice.

The word 'apprentice' says that you not only are a learner but also are willing and ready to take action that will demand greater leadership responsibility in order to further the movement of Jesus.

Big dreams change your questions
Big dreams change your prayers
If you don't have a dream that leads you to greater dependence on God, than you need to get a bigger dream!
"God is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us." Eph 3:20
Big dreams change others
Big dreams are also contagious. They are infectious. They not only change you, but they can also slowly begin to change your friends and those around you! Big dreams generate excitement, and they attract those who want to follow your example and step out in faith.
Big dreams change you
...the biggest change agent in my life has been this dream of two hundred locations in Chicagoland and becoming a catalyst for a movement of reproducing churches. Because I have embraced this dream, I now have different questions that drive me. I discover I am constantly drawn back to develop greater dependence  on God.

The mission statement of the church was simple enough that it got into the conversation and prayers of the people. Often people are heard praying 'Lord, use me to help more and more people find their way back to you.'

Road signs that sum up their apprenticeship approach:
Give Way sign - Go sign - one lane becoming two sign
Holy Spirit led - Missional - Reproducing 

Three characteristics of a Jesus apprentice:
1. Spirit-led apprentice
Being spirit led is the most critical quality in the life of an apprentice of Jesus.
Perry Noble: 'Leadership is as easy as listening to God.'
Listening to God and teaching your people to listen to God is key.
Several years back I went to New Hope Honolulu and spent some time with Wayne Cordeiro at a pastors practicum. The single most important takeaway? How he had his people journalling every day. We stole the idea and made our own 3C journals.
2. Missional Apprentice
the story of Sher - Sher started befriending homeless people in Chicago. For her birthday instead of having a birthday party she got her small group to put on a party in the homeless area under the bridge .They struck up friendships and now have a mission group that spend time with those homeless people. read story on p55
I find that there are two common fears that keep us and our churches from taking risks for the sake of mission. The first is our fear of failure. We say to ourselves, 'I'm afraid it just won't work... and I can't accept the possibility of failure.' The second fear that keeps us from taking risks is closesly related - it's the fear of loss. We work for years to build a large church or successful career, and our 'success' can become the very thing that gets in the way of our taking more significant risks.
Faith is risky business; it's a refusal to play it safe!
3. Reproducing Apprentice

C4: Reproducing Leaders

Everything rises and falls on leadership
Twelve indicators that leadership is lacking
1. I wait for someone to tell me what to do rather than taking the initiative myself.
2. I spend too much time talking about how things should be different.
3. I blame the context, surroundings, or other people for my current situation.
4. I am more concerned about being cool or accepted than doing the right thing.
5. I seek consensus rather than casting vision for a preferable future.
6. I am not taking any significant risks.
7. I accept the status quo as the way it's always been and always will be.
8. I start protecting my reputation instead of opening myself up to opposition.
9. I procrastinate to avoid making a tough call.
10. I talk to others about the problem rather than taking it to the person responsible.
11. I don't feel like my butt is on the line for anything significant.
12. I ask for way too many opinions before taking action.

Occasionally you will find a church that is able to launch new locations because of its size or because of significant financial resources. This is not a reproducing church. A reproducing church is a church that is repeatedly launching new small groups, teams, services, campuses, churches and even netwoks. And there are really no shortcuts to doing this. More than anything else, it demands the intentional and systematic reproduction of leaders.

Four relationships every leader needs:
1. A reproducing leader needs followers
There is a difference between attracting a crowd and developing a following. Crowds are temporary. They come and go. They're fickle and unpredictable. But followers are in it for the long haul.
We have found small groups to be the best place to put this principle to the test, because only a person who is capable of developing followers will be successful at leading a small group.

2. A reproducing leader needs apprentices 
We challenge every leader to have at least on apprentice - someone he or she is working with and devloping to become a leader as well.
2 Timothy 2:2 (the 2-2-2 principle)

"The things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others."

In this passage Paul is speaking of reproducing leaders into the fourth generation:
First generation        :   Paul
Second generation   :   instructs Timothy
Third generation      :    to invest in 'reliable men'
Fourth generation    :    'who will also be qualified to teach others'

Apprenticeship is not about finding people who can help us to do tasks more effectively... At the heart of biblical apprenticeship is a mindset of reproduction: reproducing our leadership so the mission will be carried on to future generations. We love using the word apprentice, because it conveys the idea that the person in that role is aspiring to something more. They are in a temporary role, being trained for something else. An apprentice is not a co-leader or an assistant leader; an apprentice is someone who is being equipped and trained to become a leader who will then be responsible for leading others.

Reproducing strategy:
1. I do. You watch. We talk.
2. I do. You help. We talk.
3. You do. I help. We talk.
4. You do. I watch. We talk.
5. You do. Someone else watches.

3. A reproducing leader needs peers.
The best form of accountability is 'peer-to-peer' accountability.

Huddles are monthly gatherings of leaders in small groups that include four basic activities:
1) praying for each other
2) sharing wins
3) disclosing challenges
4) exchanging best practises

Even before we launched our first public celebration service at Comunity we held monthly gatherings for leaders called Leadership Community. The key elements are: vision, huddle and skill (p65)

Good leaders quickly learn that they need wise counsel from other leaders. Solomon was the wisest man in the world, and true wisdom recognizes that it doesn't know everything - it seeks counsel from others.

4. A reproducing leader needs a coach
Developing a leadership layer of non paid coaches (leaders of leaders) has long been a priority for us. Eventually though we came to the realization that in order for us to continue to grow, reproduce, and care for the number of people God continues to send us, we just couldn't afford to hire and pay enough staff to carry out the task.

C5: Reproducing Artists
The crucial creative class.

If you asked me to give you the absolute essentials for spreading a missional movement of reproducing churches, I would narrow it down to two things:
    1. Reproduce more and better leaders
    2. Reproduce more and better artists

Richard Florida author of The Rise of the Creative Class, presents his ground breaking research to city planners and real estate developers, explaining that if they want to revitalize a region, they must begin by attracting the creative class. He writes:

The creative centers tend to be the economic winners of our age... in the form of innovations and high-tech industry growth. The creative centers also show strong signs of overall regional vitality, such as increase in regional employment and population.

Florida goes on to demonstrate that throughout North America there is a direct correlation between the size and concentration of the creative class and the vitality of the community.

There is a lesson here for the church: if we want to see vitality in our churches, we need to attract artists and others in the creative class... in other words we must become churches that make room for creative people to be creative!

Artists help sustain new communities
Wherever the creative class gravitates, there will be the creating of culture. These will be the physical and philosophical places where new communities of faith emerge.
Go for - Excellence in Execution and Excellence in Reprocuing
Seasons and standards:
1. Seasons. in every church there are peak seasons when you have an influx of newcomers. Typically, these seasons are around 'back to school', Christmas, Easter. During these seasons you want nothing to get in the way of people finding their way back to God, so you intentionally focus your time and energy on exdellence in execution. During other seasons of the year, you are free to focus more on the reproduction of artists.
2. Standards. It's a good idea to create a standard of excellence that you will never compromise. This standard is in place to make sure that poor execution doesn't distract people from the voice of God when celebrating. You should continue to hold up this standard while you are reproducing.

Creating culture that attracts artists
Cultural key 1: Take Risks
Eric Bramlett (coauthor of Big Ideas) 'Art by its very nature requires risk, the risk of expressing your most intimate creative thoughts and ideas on a canvas or dance floor or through music in front of large crowds. The crowds show up to watch the artist and can either cheer with raucous applause or boo and heckle with catcalls. Art is a risk!'
As I listened to Eric that day I began to see why most churches tend to repel artists. Many churches are not known as great risk-taking organisations. Some churches even pride themselves on being conservative.
X - One time we had a service where we took a creative risk using fire. The fire was so out of control we had to evacuate the room.
We are now at a place, in our church where we routinely take artistic risks. We have done musical theater, hip-hop, a full orchestra and even a kazoo band. We have done services where we tattoo everybody - and services where we anoint everyone. Many of these risks have worked marvelously - and some have been huge failures.

Cultural Key 2: Develop Relationships
artists with one another

Cultural Key 3: Give them a role
get people serving

Cultural Key 4: Plan To Reproduce
To esnure that you are attracting artists, make sure that you creat within your culture an expectation that every artist eproduces another artist. You may call it shadowing, understudy, second chari, or apprenticeship, but it is an understanding that we not only do art; we also bring other artists alongside us and help them develop their gifts.

Cultural Key 5: Rock it Out!
Give your artists freedom to express themselves with passion. Go all out!

Five Factors for reproducing artists:
Factor 1: Think 30 percent
That's the percentage of people in your church who could be engaged in the arts. Three out of every ten people who show up every weekend could be playing, performing or supporting the arts in your community. Does that percentage seem high to you?
...many church leaders have bought into a false standard of excellence. They tend to think that there are relatively few artists who can meet the acceptable standard for good quality. But it's just not true.
...Factor 5: Let pagans play (!)
Since we encourage people at all stages of spiritual growth to use their art for God, we have lots of artists who are recruited by other artists and begin doing their art at our church before they become Christ followers. We're not only okay with; we encourage it.

C7: Reproducing Groups

The power of community:
In the Alameda County Study a group of researchers tracked the lives of seven thousand people in Alameda County, California, over a nine-year period. What they found is pretty interesting:

• People with weak relational connections were three times more likely to die than those with strong relational connections.
• People who had bad health habits, like smoking and eating the wrong kinds of food, but had strong relational ties lived significantly longer than people who had great health habits but lived more isolated lives

John Ortberg was right when he said: "It's far better to eat Twinkies with good friends than to eat broccoli all alone!"

In another study from the Journal of the American Medical Association 276 peropla volunteered to be exposed to the common cold virus. The researchers discovered that:

• People who had strong relational connections were four times better at fighting off illness than those who didn't.
• People with strong relational connections were significantly less susceptible to catching cole, had fewer viruses in their system, and produced less mucous(!)

Our small group strategy has been built around three core values:

Connecting the unconnected, developing 3C Christ followers, and reproducing groups and leaders.

Value #1: Connecting the unconnected:

Dallas Willard: "God's aim in human history is the creation of an inclusive community of loving persons, with Himself included as its primary sustainer and most glorious inhabitant."

It is only through small groups that we are able to facilitate the kind of community that God wants you, your friends, and your church to experience.

If you were to start a small group today, and within a year start another groups, and each new group you started would start a new group of its own every year, at the end of five years, how many people do you think would be directly or indirectly impacted in a life-changing way by your actions? At the end of five years you would have thirty-two groups impacting somewhere around 320 people. Now that's a plan!

Value #2: Developing 3C Christ followers

We expect anyone who wants to deepen their relationship with Christ to continually grow in these three C experiences:

• Celebrate
• Connect
• Contribute

Celebrate: Small groups need to be centers of celebration. We can celebrate the simplest of blessings, like a job promotion or a birthday. We can also celebrate the more significant wins in life, like a renewal of wedding vows or the adoption of a child.

Connect: In our fast-paced fragmented lifestyles the very thought of connecting daily seems absurd. Most people in our communities and churches would think, "you've got to be nuts! A celebration service once a week and a small group gathering once a week or every week is already a stretch. You want us to connect every day? Not a chance. But this kind of regular, daily interaction was one of the dominant characteristics of this attractive community.

Jospeh Myers in Organic Community - Four patterns of belonging: public, social, personal and intimate. Myers concludes that the healthy community occurs when our connections or 'belongings' are greatest in the public realm and decrease in each succeeding realm as we discern those with whom we can experience a significant level of intimacy relationally. Myers suggests that connections in all four of these spaces contribute to our health and connectedness. I would agree with him and add that an increase in the frequency of time spent with the same people in these spaces will result in the greatest depth of community. 

Experience: We find that groups who come together without an external 'contribute' component or missional focus often fail to experience the same depth of community as do the groups who seek out opportunities to contribute to a particular cause and work together.

Michael Stewart says that 'At Austin Stone (church) we have realized that when you aim for Acts 2 community, you will get neither community nor mission. But if you aim to pursue Jesus and his mission, you'll get both mission and community.

Value #3: Reproducing Groups & Leaders

Just as healthy organisms will reproduce - one cell at a time - healthy churches can reproduce one small group at a time.

Small group reproduction is really all about leader development.

Why Small Groups are the best place to reproduce leaders:

#2 Small groups are a great place to receive honest feedback.

Receiving the kind of honest feedback a developing leader needs can be extremely difficult. And this is increasingly true as your influence grows. When you are responsible for larger numbers of people and are perceived to have more authority, you are less likely to receive constructive criticism. This is one reason why so many leaders in positions of great influence fail. Few people have the courage to speak the truth to them.

I encourage leaders to ask their group members to complete this sentence on a regular basis: 'If I were the leader of this group, I would...'

#3 Small groups are a great place to 'get church'

two key leadership principles: 1) real leadership involves serving others and 2) real leaders take responsibility for the actions of their followers.

We've coached hundreds of churches that want to reproduce new sites. Without question, the churches that are most successful are those that have in place a culture of reproducing small groups.

Myths about reproducing small groups:
Joel Comiskey in his book Home Cell Group Explosion has researched the fastest growing small group churches in the world. More than seven hundred small group leaders completed his twenty-nine question survey designed to determine why some small group leaders succeed and others do not...

Factors that do not affect small group reproduction:
1. the leader's gender, social class, age, marital status, and education were not factors.
2. the leader's personality type was not a factor.
3. the leader's spiritual gifting was not a factor.

Factors that do affect small group reproduction:

1. The leader's prayer life. The one factor in the survey that seemed to have the greatest effect on whether a group reproduces is how much time the leader spends praying for group members. The leader's devotional life consistently appears among the three most important variables in the study.
2. The leaders setting goals to multiply. 
3. The leaders receiving effective training. 
4. The groupps evangelistic efforts. If you have lots of newcomers, you're more likely to reproduce your groups.

Page 102 - great story about the life-changing impact a small group had on an older guy in the church.

C7: Reproducing Missional Teams
Communities with a cause

"I think I accidentally planted a church." Brilliant story about Shawn, a surfer, who started meeting with other surfers on a Sunday morning and gradually grew his group to the size of a church. page 104

When Jesus told his followrs, 'Go and made disciples of all nations.' he was not saying anything radically new. He was simply reminding them, once again that the mission of a Christ follower is to go.

Be honest. Isn't there something inside of you that knows you are supposed to be out there beyond the walls of the church facility  Isn't it a bit unrealistic to insist that the world should come to us and fit inside our church buildings? If you believe that Jesus told you and me to go because he really meant for us to go - and not just invite people to church - why don't you and your friends start a 3C community and begin reproducing missional teams? Well, why not?

What makes a missional team distinct is that it has a cause-related focus. In the previous chapter I gave you a small group model that includes the three Cs but has a greater initial emphasis on connecting than on celebrating or contributing. By contrast, a missional team will be comprised of the three Cs but will ultimately have a greater emphasis on contributing.

Kirsten Strand's story page 108 - great story about a lady who started a ministry to reach poor people.
"Through this informal training, I learned that one of they key principles of Christian community development is 'relocation'. If you are going to serve in a community you really need to live there and be a part of it.

How to reproduce 3C communities:
1.Believe that Acts 1:8 was meant to be accomplished. We need every follower of Christ engaged and mobilised in the movement.
2. Ordain every Christ follower to start a church. I said to our people 'as your pastor, I give you permission to go and plant churches.' At that moment, I felt an overwhelming sense of God's approval.
3. Teach people to 'go' and not just 'bring'. Donna began her own weekly rides where she invites anyone who likes motorcycles to meet her for breakfast and a ride. The group meets every Sunday morning at a local restaurant called Elmer's Doghouse. Over the last year more than two hundred different riders started their engines and hit the road with Donna. her simple goal is to love them, help them love each other, and look for opportunities to pray for her friends.
4. Plant the gospel before planting a church or starting a group.
Missional teams will go and live among the people with a readiness to serve them from that context, they will ask two important questions (in this order):
           i. What is good news (gospel) for these people?
           ii. What is church for this people group?
A missional team does not presume to know the answers to these questions before they live as Christ among them.
Churches should grow out of mission, not the other way around.
5. Recognise that Missional Teams must be both incarnational and apostolic.
If missional teams do not think in terms of apprenticeships and reproducing leaders, their work will always be limited to one place for one period of time. However if a missional team will think apostolically and emphasise reproduction, their impact will grow exponentially  All successful movements are both incarnational and apostolic. 
6. Provide Missional Teams with coaching and training.
Missional teams like every other kind of group or team, need two types of support: coaching and training. The kind of training missional teams need beofre they start is primarily in developing a missional imagination - helping people to see the possibilities that God has already put before them.
7. Get comfortable with chaos and failure.
Here are the brutal facts: if we give our leaders permission to go out and start missional communities and churches that will reach people for Jesus, it will not be perfectly organised and it will certainly not be on hundred percent successful. 
Montgomery Campus - In spite of what we believed were our best efforts, eight months after the launch, this new campus was closed... we now recognise several strategic mistakes we made in launching this campus. Our launch team was too small, we did not have enough small groups in place before we launched, and we failed to recognise the cultural differences in this community.
As hard as this decision was for me personally I know it was much more painful for our campus pastor and launch team who gave every last ounce of energy and prayer they could to make it work.

Total Church: Gospel, Mission, Discipleship & Community

Chapter 1: Gospel Centered

Where God's word is not heard, chaos and darkness close in again.

It is as if the word of God does laser surgery on our souls. It exposes our thinking and motives. It is the only mirror in which we truly see ourselves, for it is the mirror which reflects our hearts.

Persevering faith comes through the word of God.
In the church the risen Christ rules through the word of God. This is why the only skill required of church leaders is that they can teach...

The growth of God's kingdom is synonymous with the spread of God's word. The kingdom grows through the word as it elicits faith.

The community formed by the gospel for the gospel is the community in which God dwells by his Spirit.

But we need look no further than the Psalms to see how important emotion is in true faith. The Psalms are God's revelation of how we should respond to God's revelation and they express the full range of emotions.

It is the Spirit who makes Christ's words known to us, applying them to our lives and making them live.

All Scripture is God breathed says Paul (2T3:16). In both Hebrew and Greek 'spirit' and 'breath' are the same word.

Spiritual experience that does not arise from God's word is not Christian experience. Other religions offer spiritual experiences. Concerts and therapy sessions can affect our emotions. Not all that passes for Christian experience is genuine. An authentic experience of the Spirit is an experience in response to the gospel. I would add that it needs to come from a revelation of who Christ is.

It also means that Bible study and theology that do not lead to love for God and a desire to do his will - to worship, tears, laughters, excitement or sorrow - have gone terribly wrong. True theology leads to love, mission and doxology.

When we study God's word we should pray that the Spirit of God will not only inform our heads, but also inspire our hearts.

Mission centred living
Being gospel-centered means being mission-centred, for the gospel is a missionary word.

Chris Wright - a radical God-centred perspective 'turns inside out and upside down some of the common ways in which we are accustomed to think about the Christian life... It constantly forces us to open our eyes to the big picture, rather than shelter in the cosy narcissism of our own small worlds.'

We ask 'where does god fit into the story of my life?', when the real question is 'where does my little life fit into this great story of God's mission?'

In March 2003 the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity in association with the Evangelical Alliance published a report entitled 'Imagine How We Can Reach the UK'. It was the first of a major research project involving hundreds of questionnaires and consultations with church leaders. The report concluded:

"The reason the UK church is not effective in mission is because we are not making disciples who can live well for Christ in today's culture and engage compellingly with the people they meet... Jesus had a 'train and release' strategy while overall we have a 'convert and retain' strategy."

In the last twenty years it claimed we have produced plenty of creative evangelistic materials, but little to help Christians connect their faith to the whole of life. The report blames this on a sacred-secular divide: 'the pervasive belief that some things are important to God - such as church, prayer meetings, social action, Alpha - but that other human activities are at best neutral - work, school, college, sport, the arts, leisure, rest, sleep. As a result the vast majority of Chritsians have not been helped to see that who they are and what they do every day in schools. workplaces or clubs is significant to God, nor that the people they spend time with in those everyday contexts are the people God is calling them to pray fo, bless and witness to."

If someone was being sent as a missionary to a hostile context overseas, our attitude would be something like this: We would expect to pray often for them. We would expect progress in building relationships and sharing the gospel to be slow. We would be excited by small steps - a gospel conversation here, an opportunity to get to know someone there. We would thrive on regular updates from the front line. But the truth is that the lives of many Christians in work, and play, are just like the life of that far-flung missionary! They are lived out in tough environments where progress is often slow and many factors make evangelism extremely difficult. The challenge is to make news from the staff canteen as valued as news from the overseas mission field.

We have a ghetto mentality  We think of church as the faithful few, backs against the wall. But in fact during the week we are dispersed throughout the world. We are already infiltrating the kingdom of Satan.

The Imagine Report concluded: "The Uk will never be reached until we create open, authentic, learning and praying communities that are focused on making whole-life disciples who live and share the Gospel wherever they relate to people in their daily lives."

Chapter 2: Why Community?

We are not saved individually and then choose to join the church as if it were some club or support group.

John Stott: The church lies at the veryt centre of the eternal purpose of God. It is not a divine afterthought. It is not an accident of history. On the contrary, the church is God's new community. For this purpose, conceived in a past eternioty, being worked out in history, and to be perfected in a future eternity, is not just to save isolated individuals and so perpetuate our loneliness, but rather to build his church, that is, to call out of the world a people for his own glory.

Xhosa proverb: A person is a person through persons.

But the key defining relationship for Christians is our relationship with God. Who am I? I am a child of God, the bride of his Son and the dwelling place of his Spirit. And this identity is given to me by grace.

Peter writes to Christians facing persecution, calling them 'strangers' in the world (1P2:11). The word literally means 'without family' or 'without home' (paroikos). The Roman Empire was viewed as a family (oikos) with Caesar as its patriarch.

As leaders, we submit our schedules, priorities and key decisions to the community.

'Salt and light' - Jesus did not pluck these metaphors from the air. In the Old Testament salt is used as a symbol of the unbreakable nature of God's covenant-al relationship with his people (Lev2:13, N18:19, 2Ch13:5). Now Jesus calls his small band of disciples God's new salt community because of the old salt community has irreversibly lost its 'saltiness'. In an overt reference t the judgement of the exile, Jesus refers to the old community being thrown out and trampled under foot.

Here Jesus speaks of his messianic community as the light of the world. God's glory will radiate to the nations as they live under the Messiah's rule in obedience to his word.

Our identity as human beings is found in community. Our identity as Christians is found in Christ's new community. And our mission takes place through communities of light. Christianity is 'total church.'

Change your community... You don't have to mount a campaign for change - just get on with it and make community infectious. Create something that people want to be a part of.

Gospel and Community in Practise:


John Calvin said that the church is the mother of all believers 'she brings them to new birth by the word of God, educates and nourishes them all their life, strengthens them and finally leads them to complete perfection.' From 'Total Church'

'All men will know you are my disciples if you love one another. Before they are preachers, leaders or church planters, the disciples are to be lovers. This is the test of whether or not they have known Jesus.' From 'Total Church'

People want a form of evangelism that they can stick in their schedule, switch off and go home from. Jesus calls us to a lifestyle of love.

Too much evangelism is an attempt to answer questions people are not asking. Let them experience the life of the Christian community.

Our commitment to one another  despite our differences and our grace towards one another's failures are more eloquent testimony to the grace of God than any pretence at perfection.

Evangelism is a community project. Everyone has a part to play: the new Christian, the introvert, the extrovert, the eloquent, the stuttering, the intelligent, the awkward. I may be the one who has begun to build a relationship with my neighbour, but in introducing him to community, it is someone else who shares the gospel with him.

Join, attend, visit, participate: the missionaries approach to community life.

Three strand approach to evangelism: Building relationships, sharing the gospel, introducing people to the community.

7. Discipleship and training
p109

Every Christian is a disciple of Jesus because in the kingdom of God it is only Jesus who has disciples. It is legitimate to talk about Christians discipling one another as long as we recognize that we are describing the process by which disciples of King Jesus help one another to better disciples of King Jesus.

The gospel word and gospel community are central to the evangelistic process. It is the same for discipleship.

We ought to continue to 'evangelise' one another since it is the gospel message we exhort and encourage one another with.

It is in the family of God that I am able to care and be cared for love and be loved; forgive and be forgiven; rebuke and be rebuked; encourage and be encouraged. All of which is essential to the task of being a disciple of the risen Lord Jesus. Too often, however, churches are not contexts for making disciples so much as occasions for recognizing relative strangers.

Philip Yancey says: 'we often find ourselves with people we most want to live with, thus forming a club or clique, not a community. Anyone can form a club; it takes grace, shared vision, and hard work to form a community.'

To be a community of light from which the light of Christ will emanate we need to be intentional in our relationships: to love the unlovely, forgive the unforgiveable, embrace the repulsive, include the awkward, accept the weird.

Sermons count for nothing in God's sight. We rate churches by whether they have good teaching or not. But James says great teaching counts for nothing. What counts is the practise of the word.

We should be teaching one another the Bible as we are out walking, driving the car or washing the dishes.

Informal but intentional.

In becoming a Christian I am a disciple, but that is an identity not an event.

Church discipline: Anyone who has a family will know that there is more likelihood of success in dealing with acute disciplinary issues children, if you have shown commitment as parents to creating an environment of care and discipline. Church discipline needs to become a daily reality in which rebuke and exhortation are normal. Without this, any form of confrontation will itself create a sense of crisis.

We cannot be content with a morality of negatives (do not get drunk, do not swear). We need to take responsibility for each other's godliness - not only at the level of behaviour but of attitudes and underlying idolatries.

Illustration: life direction

Many people live their life like Christopher Columbus who set off not knowing where he was going, he didn't know where he was when he got there and he didn't know where he'd been when he got back.

Simply Jesus: Tom Wright

Preface:

When someone asked Augustine what God was doing before creation he replied that God was making hell for people who ask silly questions.

Chapter 1: A very odd sort of king

My computer will, I am reliably informed, do a large number of complex tasks. I only use it, however, for three things: writing, email, and occasional internet searches. If my computer were a person, it would feel frsutrated and grossly unvervalued, its full potential nowhere near realized. We are, I believe, in that position today when we read the stories of Jesus in the gospels. We in the churches use these stories for various obvious things: little moralizing sermons on how to behave in the coming week, aids to prayer and meditation, extra padding for a theological picture largely constructed from elsewhere. The gospels, like my computrer, have ever right to feel frustrated. Their full potential remains unrealized.
Worse, Jesus himself has every right to feel frustrated.

You see, the reason Jesus wasn't the sort of king people had wanted in his own day is - to anticipate our conclusion - that he was the true king, but they had become used to the ordinary, shabby, second-rate sort. They were looking for a builder to construct the home they thought they wanted, but he was the architect, coming with a new plan that would give them everything they needed, but within a quite new framework. They were looking for a singer to sing the song they had been humming for a long time, but he was the composer bringing them a new song to which the old songs they knew would form, at best, the background music.

Perhaps, indeed, it has been the same in our own day. Perhaps even 'his own people' - this time not the Jewish people of the first century, but the would be Christian people of the Western world - have not been ready to recognize Jesus himsefl. We want a 'religious' leader, not a king! We want someone to save our souls, not rule our world! Or, if we want a king, someone to take charge of our world, what we want is someone to implement the policies we already embrace, just as Jesus' contemporaries did.

Like many thousands of young Jews in that period, he died by crucifixion

Chapter 2: Three puzzles

Throughout his short p[ublic cvarer Jesus spoke and acted as if he was in charge.
Jesus did thjings people didnt think you werte allowed to do, and he explained them by saying he had the right to do them.

Chapter 3: The perfect Storm

If you want to know why the 'new atheists' like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Atkins sell so many books the answer is that they're offering the modernist version of the good old fashioned theological term 'assurance'. they are assuring anxious ex-believers that the nightmare of small-minded and stultifying 'religion' is gone for ever.

We have dreams of being free, grown-up humans, and we don;t want to bend the knee to anyone, especially that fussy old God or that strange character Jesus! Actually, the sceptics, who take grim comfort from the apparent decline of many mainstream churches, don't often focus on Jesus himself. They have far softer targets to aim at (badly behaved clergy, for a start). But if they do mention Jesus, they tend to dismiss him with a wave of the hand. Just a first-century fanatic whose wild-eyed followers turned him into a god. Or, damning him with faint praise, just a mild-mannered first century moralist, one of many great teachers down through the ages. Those are the internal dynamics of the westerly wind, the howling gale of contemporary scepticism.

If we don't make the effort to do this reconstruction, we will, without a shadow of a doubt, assume that what Jesus did and said makes the sense it might have made in some other context - perhaps our own. That has happened again and again. I believe that this kind of easy-going anachronism is almost as corrosive to genuine Christian faith as scepticism itself.

Chapter 4: The making of a first-century storm

The Roman storm...
'Caesar' was simply his family name, but Julius made it a royal title from that day on (the words 'kaiser' and 'Tsar' are variation on 'Caesar')

If you'd asked anybody in the Roman Empire, from Germany to Egypt, from Spain to Syria, who the 'son of god' might be, the obvious answer, the politically correct answer, would have been 'Octavian'.

Meanwhile, Augustus's court poets and historians did a great job with their propaganda. They told the thousand-year story of Rome as a long and winding narrative that had reached its great climax at last; the golden age had begun with the birth of the new child through whom peace and prosperity would spread to the whole world.

Why was Rome then particularly interested in the Middle East?
For reasons surprisingly similar to those of today's Western powers. Rome needed the Middle East for urgent supplies of necessary raw materials. Today it's oil; then it was grain.

The Jewish storm...

This is the story within which many Jews of Jesus' day believed, passionately, that they themselves were living. They were not just telling it as an ancient memory. They were, themselves, actors within its ongoing drama.

Progress: This is the so-called Whig view of history writ large: history is the story of movement of progress freedom, and we must go forward and make the next one happen, and the next one after that. Despite all the tyrannies of the last century, people today still believe this myth of progress, as evidenced by the numerous proposals you read or hear that begin, 'Now that we live in this day and age...' or 'Now that we live in the twenty-first century...' Those phrases signal the presence of some kind of 'progressive' agenda. People who think like that are actors in a play whose script they already know.

Whereas the Romans had what we might call a retrospective eschatology, in which people looked back from a 'golden age' that had already arrived and saw the whole story of how they had arrived at that point, the Jews cherished and celebrated a prospective eschatology, looking forward from within a decidedly ungolden age and longing and praying fervently for the freedom, justice, peace that they they were convinced were theirs by right. God would do it! It was going to happen at last!

Understand the Exodus and you understand a good deal about Judaism. And about Jesus. Jesus chose Passover, the great national festival celebration the Exodus, to make his crucial move.

Every time the Jewish people told the story (and they told it often) that was what they were thinking and hoping and praying for. It was this hope, this story that generated the second great storm wind, the powerful high-pressure system, into whose path Jesus of Nazareth decided to walk. And eventually, to ride a donkey.

Commenting on living in Jerusalem for 3 months in 1989 and seeing different banners/poster with religious slogans on:

It was because of what Hitler did that God would now do a new thing. And it was because of what Hitler did that this Jewish community was praying and waiting and longing for - the Messiah. 'Hitler and the Messiah!' 'Hitler and the Messiah!' The great wicked ruler and the coming great deliverer! That was the message I saw then.

Chapter 5: The hurricane...

God remained free and sovereign. Again and again in the past, the way Israel had told its own story was different from the way God was planning things. The people, no doubt, hoped that the way they were telling their own story would fit comfortably enough with the way God was seeing things, but again and again the prophets had to say that this was not so. Often God's way of telling the story cut clean against the national narrative. And Jesus believed that this was happening again in his own time.

The wind of God:

Here then is the third element in the first-century perfect storm: the strange, unpredictable and highly dangerous divine element. The wind of God.

But the prophets, up to and including John the Baptist, had always warned that God's coming in power and in person would be entirely on his own terms, with his own purpose - and that his own people would be as much under judgement as anyone, if their aspirations didn't coincide with God's.
Jesus not only believed that this was another of those moments... he believed, it seems... that as he came to Jerusalem he was embodying, incarnating, the return of Israel's God to his people in power and glory.

Jesus said 'this is God's chosen moment, and you were looking the other way'

Your dreams of national liberation, leading you into head-on confrontation with Rome, were not God's dreams. God called Israel, so that through Israel he might redeem the world; but Israel itself needs redeeming as well. Hence God comes to Israel riding on a donkey, in fulfilment of Zechariah's prophecy of the coming peaceful kingdom, announcing judgement on the system and the city...

Whatever else the ancient Israelites believed about their God, he was not a tame God.

Jerusalem, as ever, stood at the point where the tectonic plates of the world crashed together. It was, it seemed, the appropriate place of prayer for a world in pain.

As Bob Dylan once said, '"I am the Lord thy God" is a fine saying as long as it's the right person who's saying it.'

"I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me." 2 Sam 7:12-14 That promise was remembered and pondered again and again in the days to come, right up to the time of Jesus... Many saw the royal house of Israel as the means by which the living God would establish his own kingdom, his own rule or reign. There is a sense in which it isn't an either/or choice, either God or David. Somehow it seems to be both.

We notice a constant triple theme in these songs (psalms). First, Israel's God is celebrated as king especially in Jerusalem, in his home in the Temple. Second, when Israel's God is enthroned as 'king', the nations are brought under his rule. Israel rejoices, but all the other nations will be included as well... Third, when God is king, the result is proper justice, real equity, the removal of all corruption and oppression.

The coming anointed one:

Within a few years of his death, the first followers of Jesus of Nazareth were speaking and writing about him, and indeed singing about him, not just as a great teacher and healer, not just as a great spiritual leader and holy man, but as a strange combination: both the Davidic king and the returning God

In Jesus they believed God himself had indeed become king. Jesus had come to take charge, and he was now on the throne of the whole world.

This claim can never be, in our sense or indeed the ancient sense, merely 'religious'. It involves everything, from power and politics to culture and family.

But here is the puzzle - the ultimate puzzle of Jesus. This puzzle boils down to two questions. First, why would anyone say this of Jesus, who had not done the things people expected a victorious king to do? (and why would anyone, three minutes, three days, or three hundred years after that moment, ever dream of taking it seriously?). Second, what on earth might it mean today to speak of Jesus being 'king' or being 'in charge', in view of the fact that so many things in the world give no hint of such a thing?

Jesus strides into the middle of this perfect storm, announcing that the kingdom of God is at hand:

He commands his hearers to give up their other dreams and to trust his instead. This, at its simplest, is what Jesus was all about.

Chapter 6: God's in charge now

With almost every bodily problem came some sort of social problem: the farm worker who couldn't plough any more, the 'unclean' woman who couldn't share food with her family. So wherever Jesus went, he healed people.

There is every reason to suppose that this is exactly what most people saw going on as Jesus of Nazareth launched his strange, short public career.

Those who loved and worshipped Jesus wouldn't have invented tales of his being involved in dark arts. People don't accuse you of being in league with the devil unless you are doing pretty remarkable things... the explanation Jesus gave for what going on was that something new was happening - something powerful, dramatic, different. If all he'd been doing was encouraging people to feel better about themselves and not actually transforming their real lives, there would have been nothing to explain.

It may be time to be sceptical about scepticism itself.

...for the last two hundred years that's been the mood in Western society too. By all means, people think, let Jesus be a soul doctor, making people feel better inside. Let him be a rescuer, snatching people away from this world to 'heaven'. But don't let him tell us about a God who actually does things in the world. We might have to take that God seriously, just when we're discovering how to run the world our own way. Scepticism is no more 'neutral' or 'objective' than faith. It has thrived in the post-enlightenment world, which didn't want God to be king.

To the voices that trumpet their support for a 'supernatural' God doing 'miracles' through his divine 'son', I would just say, for the moment, 'be careful with your worldview. You're in danger of reaffirming the very split-level cosmos that Jesus came to reunite.

Heralds of the king

Jesus was going about sorting out the near-at-hand stuff. But he was talking, the whole time, about God being in charge on a larger scale as well. The close-up actions pointed to that greater reality. They were signs that it was starting to come true.

The same thing is true under a great empire. When Caesar's herald comes into town and declares 'we have a new emperor,' it isn't an invitation to debate the principle of imperial rule. It isn't the offer of a new feeling inside. It's a new fact, and you'd better readjust your life around it.

If we are to understand Jesus, we have to learn to see the world as his contemporaries saw it.

What went wrong?

How can you go on believing, from generation to generation, that one day God will come and take charge?
Answer: you tell the story, you sing the songs, and you keep celebrating God's victory, even though it keeps on not happening.

The festival Jesus chose to demonstrate his kingship and to act (by riding in on a donkey) was 'dense with detail and heavy with hope.'

This was the story - the tyrant, the leader, the victory, the sacrifice, the vocation, the presence of God, the promised inheritance - within which it made sense to talk about God taking charge. This was the story about God becoming king.

Since we have reason to believe that Jesus was one of the greatest communicators of all time, we must assume that this was the story he wanted them to think of. He must have known what he was doing, what pictures he was awakening in people's minds. When he was talking about God taking charge, he was talking about a new Exodus.

Chapter 7: The campaign starts here

The gospel isn't a new idea you might like to think about, but a new fact that you'd better get used to.

The proclamation of a new emperor, then, carried weight. It wasn't a take-it-or-leave-it affair. It meant that Tiberius was now in charge -and that his local agents, with his backing, had to be obeyed. Or else.

Jesus went around saying that God was in charge now. Imagine what it would be like, in Britain or the United States today, if, without an election or any other official mechanism for changing the government, someone were to to on national radio and television and announce that there was no a new prime minister or president. 'From today onwards,' says the announcer, 'we have a new ruler!' That's not only exciting talk. It's fighting talk. It's treason! It's sedition!

When a regime is already in power and is simply transferring that power to the next person in line, you just announce that it's happening. But if you make that announcement while someone else appears to be in charge, you are saying, in effect, 'The campaign starts here.'

...Jesus was concerned not just with outward structures, but with realities that would involve the entire person, the entire community. No point putting the world right if the people are still broken.

Matthew lets the list build up (of sick people being healed) until we almost take it for granted: yes, here's a person who's sick; Jesus will cure her.

He will be known as king through his victory over the tyrannical pagan kingdom of Babylon and his bringing of his people back home to their land. This was to be the new Exodus: tyrant, rescue, vocation, God's presence, inheritance. Just as physical healing is the up-close-and-personal version of what it looks like when God takes charge, to fix and mend the whole world, so individual forgiveness is the up-close-and-personal version of what it looks like when God does what he promised and restores his exiled people.

The people who will benefit will be the outsiders, the wrong people, the foreigners.

Forgiveness was at the heart of his message. This was a striking departure from the otherwise universal practice of Jewish martyrs, for whom it was a point of honour to call down heaven's curses upon their torturers and executioners.

John and Herod

John the Baptist publicly denounced this arrangement (Herod marrying his niece who was also his half-brother's wife). I don't think he was simply concerned with Antipas's immoral behaviour, though that was flagrant enough. I think the point was, more tellingly, that anyone who behaved in that way could not possibly, not ever, not in a million years, be regarded as the true 'king of the Jews'. John was expecting a true 'king of the Jews'; Antipas had just demonstrated his utter unsuitability for the position.

Jesus was well aware that what he was doing didn't fit with what people were expecting. But he believed that he was indeed launching God's kingdom-campaign. He was the on in whose presence, work and teaching Israel;s God was indeed becoming king.

He chooses twelve of his closest followers and seems to set them apart as special associates. For anyone with eyes to see, this says clearly that he is reconstituting God's people, Israel, around himself.

This is a campaign. It's a rebel; movement, a risky movement, a would-be royal movement under the nose of the present would-be 'king of the Jews', Herod Antipas himself.