SOUNDS LIKE A MOVEMENT

Church vs. The Coffee Shop

Recently I met a bright young doctoral student named Katie in the local coffee shop I work out of most days. This coffee shop has become a kind of incubator for authentic conversation and community in the town where we live.

It wasn’t long before Jesus naturally came up in my conversation with Katie as we both shared with each other the work that we do and the things that we’re passionate about. Katie’s insights regarding her own experience with Christianity were fascinating to me. She had grown up going to Catholic school where she learned that the Bible was a book of do’s and don’ts. She had once attended a church service where the pastor encouraged the congregation to rip bumper-stickers with the phrase, “coexist” off cars when they see them. When her brother had gotten his girlfriend pregnant a few years ago, her evangelical friend’s first response was “How could your brother sin and bastardize his child by not getting married first?”

Like Karl (who I introduced in our last blog), Jaimie is actually open to Jesus, though quite weary of his followers. Recently, she decided to give church another try.

“I visited a church, but besides the greeters who just handed me a bulletin, no one really talked to me or took the time to get to know me or even my name. It seemed like everyone had their own clique. It’s not like going to a coffee shop like this one. Here, people know my name. They’re friendly and they share their space with me. The people that work here even remember what drink I like to order! And I’m nobody. I’m just an ordinary person. But here, I’m not just number… I’m known.”

Is the way we do Church (even if our intentions are good) drowning people who are complete foreigners to the Jesus lifestyle?

How can we, the collective Church, God’s people, break the cycle of individualism and lead the way in loving thy neighbor?

We create movements.
The small kinds.
The natural kinds.
The kinds that carry their own unique rhythms that create a window for others into what the Kingdom of God is like.
The kinds of movements people outside the walls of the church actually feel comfortable entering into!

There are a million ways to do this. When we created what we affectionately call “SLAM” (short for “Sounds Like A Movement), we set out to build community around three rhythms we saw Jesus use that we’ll explain in the coming chapters; rhythms that act as natural entry-points into authentic relationship, the kind of relationship that leads to genuine discipleship, people teaching other people to live life the way Jesus did.

We began creating these small, simple events, some in our home, some at the local pub or coffee shop down the street, that gathered people together, people we didn’t know, people we met earlier that day, people that were looking for something to be a part of.

We got tired of complaining and hypothesizing how the Church could reach people better and we just started doing it! We are stumbling through this, the opposite of experts, learning a little every step of the way.
My hope for you is this: that in between the pages of these next few posts in this series, you’ll consider the small, you’ll embrace the simple, and you’ll find the bravery and strength to open your front door and engage a world in desperate need of Jesus right outside it.

Because that’s what sounds like a movement.

POSTED BY CJ

CONFESSIONS OF A SHELTERED CHRISTIAN

I truly believe it’s possible for someone to enter a Christian community, go to Church on Sundays, get connected in a small group, make a circle of a like-minded Christian friends who go to the same church…and never look back. I believe it because I lived it. I grew up in a Christian home going to church and youth group, went off to a Christian college, worked for a Christian company, and woke up one day realizing I didn’t have one friend that didn’t know Jesus. It wasn’t intentional, but it still felt shameful.

Somewhere along the line, a notion began to subconsciously cement itself in my psyche: that the breadth of my relationships with any non-Christians I encountered was simply to invite them to church gatherings. It made sense that I would walk around with this deep-rooted, unspoken belief; my contexts for evangelism were giant stadiums, extravagant holiday pageants, and teenagers littering urban communities with tracts while wearing neon colored t-shirts that read “takin’ it to the streets.”

Growing up, I was a part of all of those things in one way or another. But as I got older, I realized I wasn’t walking with anyone, eating with anyone, going to parties with anyone, or teaching anyone the ways of Jesus who didn’t already know him.

And that seemed like a gigantic waste.
It seemed like the very opposite of how the Jesus I was reading about in the gospels lived. How could I call myself a devoted follower of this Jesus without ever attempting to reflect his lifestyle?

The more this contradiction sat unsettled in my mind, the more I began to notice people differently. I became aware of just how many people I encountered in a given week, sometimes more than once.

People I had treated like transaction machines.
People I had never noticed with tears in their eyes.
Cashiers.
Baristas.
Mail-delivers
Hair cutters.
Old men who talked like they had lived their entire life on the same bench.
Children who never seemed to attain their parents’ attention, regardless of how hard they tried.

All this around me… in the grocery store, around the park, at the corner coffee shop. All these stories I was completely missing out on. I had a feeling I wasn’t alone.

I’m not sure what it’s like where you live, but in Orange County, California, where I’m from, people make an art-form out of keeping to themselves. It’s like Mr. Rogers never made it to syndication out here. People get up, drive to work (most of them work long hours and make A LOT of money), drive home, just to lock themselves inside of a million dollar, 4-bed room cage without paying any attention to the other cages on either side of their own.

Arcade Fire seems to capture the kind of culture I’m describing in the lyrics of their song, “City with No Children” from their album, “The Suburbs:”

“I feel like I’ve been living in a city with no children in it
A garden left for ruin by a billionaire inside of a private prison.”

How could community, something we’re inherently wired for, become so foreign? What happened to the kind of bold friendliness and curiosity that once accompanied our innocence? How come there’s a hesitancy to introduce ourselves to strangers and where did it come from?

There are about a million anthropological reasons for why these questions exist , but the bottom line is that at some point, something got broken. Sin entered the world and we learned not to trust each other, to play our cards close to our chest, to look out for ourselves above anyone else.

The Church, in our humanity, was not immune. We created detailed doctrinal statements that kept other people who didn’t think exactly like us at bay. We neglected a generation of young adults we didn’t quite understand once they went away to college. Most of all, we slowly decided to become culturally illiterate, moving away from practicing healthy rhythms that both engage and create culture while desperately still trying to keep up with it. The result, as we know, is usually a cheap imitation.

My friend, Karl, is on the path to following Jesus. The last time he attended a church was with his parents as a kid. Karl recently moved to a new city with his fiancé. Oh, and like many twenty-somethings, he deals with deep anxiety.

Imagine my friend and his fiancé walking into a church for the first time since they were children, or even a bible study for that matter. The complete culture shock it would be! The raising of arms, the Christianese language barrier, the enthusiastic but shallow greeters awaiting them at the door.

Can God move and work through these experiences? Absolutely! But doesn’t it seem a bit scary for that experience to be someone’s first introduction to the Jesus lifestyle?
The first time Karl made the bold attempt to re-enter church, he had a massive anxiety attack!

Imagine you’ve been lost in the desert for weeks and someone brings you a giant pool of water but the only way you can get to it is if you jump in. Oh..and you don’t know how to swim. What happens?

That’s right, you drown.

(The good news is it doesn’t have to be this way…but that’s for the next blog post ☺ )

POSTED BY CJ

Your Neighborhood Needs You…And You Need it Too

I love to travel.

There is a romance that exists in the mystery of a new place with unfamiliar sights, sounds and smells. It’s intoxicating. I’ve had the chance to travel all over the world and each place I go fuels an insatiable desire to experience more. Many of my trips have been involved with mission. To me, serving in mission is about reflecting, if only for a moment, the grace and love of Christ. By way of confession in my own journey, though, it’s easy to let the mission become functionally dependent on the adventure of cross-cultural platforms…while at the same time, failing miserably in the social context of our normal everyday lives!

A couple years ago my wife and I came to a crossroads of discontentment with where we were at. Being a “jump first, think later” personality I decided to begin our new journey by buying two one-way tickets to South America without telling my wife (I do not recommend this strategy). I was seeking something better than the monotony of the “9 to 5”. That something (as I saw it) was about embracing the mystery of new cultures while “saving” people around the world. This journey took us all over the map and ultimately dropped us back in our hometown in upstate NY after plans to move to West Africa fell through at the last minute.

New York was the LAST place in the world I ever imagined to be and the next few months was spent living out of our suitcases as we settled into “least exotic place on earth”. I was supposed to be changing the world! Instead I was stuck in NY with no game plan, on an indefinite layover far from my dreams and exactly where I didn’t want to be.

Then something happened. It was like God kept asking “why do you care for my children in Africa but not my children in New York?” I couldn’t shut it off. My whole worldview was being challenged.

I began realizing that I was more enamored by the mystery and the romance of some far away land than I was about real community and neighborhood. I had put contingencies on how and where I was going to live and serve those in need. The city I live outside of has one of the largest homeless populations in the country yet for some reason I was reserving all my passion for the needy for when I “get out of this place”. Please understand, I am not saying that serving cross-culturally is bad. We need to live with intention and advocate for justice wherever we can. The question I am asking, though, addresses somewhat of a pandemic issue among us millennials when it comes to standing up for a cause.

Why do we think we can change the world elsewhere if we are not uniting people through mission in our own neighborhoods?

The homeless shelter or pregnancy center down in your city might not seem as exotic as those in Africa or Asia but they are full of people, your neighbors, who need grace and love. They need someone more interested in learning their first name that tweeting about theoretical justice. You don’t need a manifesto, a website or even a strategy to start. Simply grab some friends and go discover the stories and struggles that make up your community. It might not always be sexy, but to me… it sounds like a movement.

Your neighborhood needs you, and I believe that you need your neighborhood.

- Eric Houppert, SLAMMER, New York Chapter.

DANCING WITH THE DEVIL…AND LEADING

Our culture has become so wrapped up in believing that true influence is only measured by numbers, we’ve forgotten that Jesus changed the entire world through just a few very normal, ordinary men. Sure, there were times when Jesus spoke to masses who came to hear him, but he spent the majority of his time in community with people that had no idea who he was at first. He did this, not by inviting them to a church service or asking them to join a small group, but by stepping into these natural, social rhythms… these “movements,” that marked his relationship with them.

He ate with them, he went to parties with them, he shared stories with them, he went around feeding the poor and comforting the sick with them.

And then, those twelve guys, who started out having no clue who Jesus was, changed the entire world upside down!

True discipleship.

Flash-forward to modern day. The Church has both over and under-thought this notion of discipleship and evangelism that Jesus so artfully and simplistically embodied. On one hand, we’ve placed church growth, sustainability, image, and status far above bringing non-Christians into an authentic relationship with Christ. On the other hand, when we do decide to direct our attention towards reaching those that aren’t walking with Jesus, we manage to overcomplicate the notion (gravitating towards “the big) coming up with programs, strategies, pamphlets, productions, and campaigns to somehow bring those outside our buildings inside them.

While this approach may have proven effective in the past, as our culture becomes significantly more post-Christian, I fear we, the collective Church, are failing to connect with an entire generation of young adults who have written Jesus off without ever really getting the chance to know him.

My friend, David Kinnaman, gives some incredibly detailed insight into the current chasm between young adults and the Church in his book, You Lost Me: Why Young People Are Leaving the Church…and Rethinking Faith:

The digital revolution, endemic social change, and a shifting narrative of faith in our culture have deeply affected the cognitive and emotional process of “encoding” faith. Because of access, alienation, and authority, the ability of one generation to convey the message and meaning of faith to the next generation - in thought forms, ideas, and practices they can readily understand and incorporate into their lives - has been disrupted.

This generation is, in some unprecedented ways, having to answer in-but-not-of questions. Where is the line between cultural accommodation and cultural influence? What is appropriate for Christians to participate in and what is not? Yes, these are age-old pressures; there is nothing new under the sun, but we cannot imagine that the loss of faith experienced during the 1960s occurred against the same cultural backdrop. Today an information evolution akin to the printing press - the easily accessible digitization of everything - is afoot. Fatherlessness is nearly eight times more common today than fifty years ago, and young adults are far less likely to attain “adulthood” by their thirtieth birthday. And our hyper-individualized, consumer-driven, pluralistic culture invites young people to become their own king or queen, the absolute authority in their kingdom of one. How could these changes not affect the faith journeys of young adults?

One of the primary reasons for this disconnect that the Church can take some credit for, lies in our language. When we think about “reaching out” our minds tend to automatically associate with the “marginalized” of our society. But like the word “movement,” our definition of “marginalized” needs some expanding.

Communities in Africa need to be lifted out of extreme poverty and disease. Homeless families need their physical and spiritual needs met in our cities and around the globe. The Church has done an excellent job at stepping in and being Jesus to these communities. But here’s the reality of the twenty-first century Church. There’s a gigantic chasm between the evangelical community and the generation of non-Christians living among them. This desperately needs to be mended.

This generation, when honest, would say they feel like some of the most marginalized and ostracized people group in culture, especially when it comes to the Church. I propose that we the Church, have so occupied ourselves with making sure we’re not “of the world,” that we have all but completely erased ourselves from being “in” it. We’ve spent far more time attracting other believers to our Churches and feeding a sub-culture marked by the type of events we attend, music we listen to, and people we associate with that we’ve completely neglected our mandate to engage the culture we were put on this earth to influence!

We won’t even show up to the same party as the devil, let alone dance with him. We need to learn how to dance…and lead.

Art work by SLAM intern + graphic design guru, Jesse Greenwood.

POSTED BY CJ