I think Willard has a great handle on some of the core issues we face if we are to be effective as the church. If we can get our eyes on the ball (discipleship) and help people become genuine followers of Christ rather than church attenders then despite the pain it may bring, we may actually make a difference in the world…

This article caught my eye because I have been reflecting on how we could possibly measure spiritual growth over a period of time. Willard doesn’t give easy answers (and at times his books are painfully difficult to read), but he does point the ship in the right direction.

An interview with Dallas Willard | posted 5/03/2010

How can churches know if they are being effective at making disciples?

Many churches are measuring the wrong things. We measure things like attendance and giving, but we should be looking at more fundamental things like anger, contempt, honesty, and the degree to which people are under the thumb of their lusts. Those things can be counted, but not as easily as offerings.

Why don’t more churches gauge these qualities among their people?

First of all, many leaders don’t want to measure these qualities because what they usually discover is not worth bragging about. We’d rather focus on institutional measures of success. Secondly, we must have people who are willing to be assessed in these ways. And finally, we need the right tools to measure spiritual formation. There are some good tools available like Randy Frazee’s Christian Life Profile and Monvee.com, which John Ortberg likes.

In the past people grew through relationships with spiritual mentors and by engaging the church community. Is there a danger that these individual assessment tools will remove the role of community in formation?

Any of these devices must be used in a community setting. Assessment tools that work best are a combination of self-assessment and the assessment of a significant other who knows you well. They don’t work with people who don’t want to be assessed, and they should not be administered like individual personality tests that some employers use.

If you have a group of people come together around a vision for real discipleship, people who are committed to grow, committed to change, committed to learn, then a spiritual assessment tool can work. But there must be a deep fellowship of trust to support that work. I don’t think any group should go into an assessment without that. I wouldn’t advise a pastor to use one of these tools on his or her congregation without first establishing a clear commitment to discipleship. You can’t take your average congregation and just lay one of these assessments on them.

Are you ever discouraged by how few churches have that kind of clear commitment to discipleship?

I am not discouraged because I believe that Christ is in charge of his church, with all of its warts, and moles, and hairs. He knows what he is doing and he is marching on.

But I do grieve for the people within the church who are suffering—especially the pastors and their families. They are suffering because much of North America and Europe has bought into a version of Christianity that does not include life in the kingdom of God as a disciple of Jesus Christ. They are trying to work a system that doesn’t work. Without transformation within the church, pastors are the ones who get beat up. That is why there is a constant flood of them out of the pastorate. But they are not the only ones. New people are entering the church, but a lot are also leaving. Disappointed Christians fill the landscape because we’ve not taken discipleship seriously.

Great article here from the New York Times on the challenges church leaders face in an increasingly consumeristic age. Here are a few excerpts:

The pastoral vocation is to help people grow spiritually, resist their lowest impulses and adopt higher, more compassionate ways. But churchgoers increasingly want pastors to soothe and entertain them. It’s apparent in the theater-style seating and giant projection screens in churches and in mission trips that involve more sightseeing than listening to the local people.

At their courageous best, clergy lead where people aren’t asking to go, because that’s how the range of issues that concern them expands, and how a holy community gets formed.

Ministry is a profession in which the greatest rewards include meaningfulness and integrity. When those fade under pressure from churchgoers who don’t want to be challenged or edified, pastors become candidates for stress and depression.

I think the big challenge in all of this is that we want to have good relationships with people and we want our church community to be a significant source of friendship, but to poke people out of a ‘what I want’ mentality will undoubtedly jeopardise those friendships.

We also recognise that much of what ‘people desire’ is actually good. Its great to have a competent music team, a well run kids program and a healthy youth scene, but when these then become KPIs for visitors to gauge our attractiveness by we find ourselves back in the consumer trap.

I am not sure if its avoidable and that is something I constantly wrestle with. Doing things badly is nothing to be proud of and yet doing things well can see us then ‘playing the game’.

Just a brief rant to say, we really need to stop using this expression.

I don’t know how many times lately I have heard people speak of their Sunday service and use this expression to describe how ‘totally awesome’ it was – another overused term… Come on people…

I think while we all know its theological nonsense, at another level we seem to believe it. If we feel the music is especially inspirational, or the sermon a real cracker, or if people are getting healed etc etc then we are convinced that God was definitely present.

If the singing is lame, the sermon puts you to sleep and there is no drama whatsoever then has God really not turned up?

I think my biggest issue with the phrase is that it removes the responsibility from us to be engaged and focused and puts it on God to create some fireworks. It also suggests that some churches have found the key to ‘making God dance’.

Personally… I think God turns up every week. (Its kinda hard not to when you’re God.)

Some days we notice him. Some days we give him more space to move. Some days he just does stuff irrespective of us. But he’s there – whether he likes it or not…

Francis Chan steps away from a megachurch to pursue a place of more obscurity and more faithfulness to what he believes God has called him to. Mark Driscoll asks him some good and tough questions about whether we have to take the ‘downward mobility’ route to pursue holiness or if we can be sanctified while in the flow of an affluent life.

There are some excellent questions tossed around by some good minds. Worth a listen.

I know I grapple with similar stuff and wonder if we would actually be better disciples if we were less affluent. But then I don’t see that it is God’s wish for anyone to be poor and needy either. I guess what disturbs me most is the glaring disparity between the wealth I have and the poverty in other parts of the globe and the relatively small difference I make to it all.

Yeah I know – quite bleating about and just do something…

Lately I’ve been reminded yet again that those of us who follow Jesus really ought to be living lives that don’t make much sense unless there is a God. I’m a little cautious using the word ‘ought’ because I think a lot of faith has been distorted by an abuse of it, however that’s not to say there aren’t times when it ‘ought’ to be invoked!

The obvious tension here is that most of us live in suburban Australia and we share a similar experience of life to most other Aussies. We live in houses, drive cars, eat food, go on holidays etc etc… So the question that then develops is ‘what might there about our lives that only makes sense because there is a God?‘

I don’t think we want to be at all ostentatious in our distinctiveness, yet I fear for many of us there is very little to distinguish us from your average good living Aussie.

So where would you start if you considering how we might live lives that are genuinely distinctive because they have been shaped by the life of Christ?

From

I have pretty much just copied his post as it needs some context. Of course we wouldn’t want to hear this, so best to ignore it 🙂

I was struck by the following, a quote within a quote from the June 7th 2010 issue of Time Magazine. The article I’m referencing was the feature article on the Papacy and trouble besetting the world-wide Catholic Church

I always find myself intrigued by the different analyses of various faith stages. I have written previously about Fowler and how used these stages in his ‘Churchless Faith’ research. Very helpful I thought.

Last week Len Hjalmarson wrote about this from a different perspective and I thought its simplicity was also quite useful.

Len writes:

For myself I can see the first 5 stages playing out at different points in my life and while I don’t really like the description for stage 6, I think I get the gist of what’s being said.

Unlike Fowler that has more of a cognitive approach, this schema seems to pick up on how we relate to God. I think its important to acknowledge that for many people there is a ‘stage 4’. Whether its that ‘prayer doesn’t work’, or ‘church doesn’t cut it’, or the ‘Bible seems irrelevant’, we all go thru questioning and doubting places.

In those difficult places some will retreat to earlier stages and fan the flames of nostalgia hoping to rekindle some of the old passion, while others will push on and discover a different way of living – a way of being that can only come after some displacement, frustration and confusion.

I have said it before and I’d want to say it again, that its vital we help people develop in all stages of their faith. Typically evangelicals sit more at ease with stages 1-3 (we even excel at 2 and 3!) But we often find ‘4’ to be on a par with rejecting faith and hence in that place people are extremely vulnerable to giving up on faith altogether if they are not given a space in which to air their concerns.

Equally those at later stages of the faith journey need to avoid the arrogance of looking condescendingly on those in earlier stages. Being a child isn’t something to look down on, unless of course you refuse to grow up…

I finished ‘Untamed‘ this morning, a fantastic book on missional discipleship by Alan & Deb Hirsch. Having been around these guys for so long and knowing them well, many of the stories and ideas were familiar, but I still found the book itself is an inspiring and challenging read. When do we ever stop needing to be challenged in our discipleship?!

Particularly potent was the final ‘afterword’ where the Hirsch’s cite Kierkegaarde’s ‘Geese Parable’, a version of which I have found online here

Sorenn Kierkegaard, the famous Danish Christian philosopher, grew up in the countryside surrounded by farms that reared geese (among other animals). Each spring he would watch as a new gaggle of goslings was hatched and began to be fattened for the table. Over the course of their short lives these geese would gorge themselves at constantly refilled troughs of grain until they were so fat they could hardly walk. He imagined that they believed their lives to be perfect, as every need they had was catered in abundance.

When autumn came, the truth became apparent. The wild geese that had spent the warm summer months in Denmark would gather in preparation for their southerly migration. As they assembled to fly south they would circle in the skies above the farms, calling out to any stragglers to join in their flight. At this point the farmed geese would lift their heads from the feeding troughs and look into the skies, heeding the call of their wild cousins. For the first time in their lives they would become animated, running as best they could around their enclosures and attempting to fly. Of course, their gluttonous diet and life of luxury meant that they were far too fat to get airborne – but still they would try. And then, as quickly as the commotion had started, the wild geese would fly off and the fattened farm geese would watch them briefly before returning to their grain to continue eating their way to their deaths.

The Hirsch’s add that the parable goes on to tell of a wild goose who looked with dismay at his domesticated cousins and decided to go and spend time with them in order to help them awaken to their true calling as geese and join the others in wild flight. Sadly he lived there till he was tamed also. Every year he would see his old friends fly overhead, strengthen his resolve to fly again, but then lapse back into the comfort of the feeding trough. Kierkegaarde’s point is that when a wild goose is tamed, seldom does it become wild again.

In light of what I shared in the previous post, this parable is a warning that when we lose our passion for the life of authentic discipleship, chances are we will be so conformed to comforts of our new context that we might never ‘fly again’

Untamed is a very easy read, yet its got some real horsepower in its concepts and stories, so if you would like to be inspired afresh to a life of ‘wild geese’ discipleship then I’d recommend it.