sentness

The Choice Before Us

“There exists in every church something that sooner or later works against the very purpose for which it came into existence. So we must strive very hard, by the grace of God, to keep the church focused on the mission that Christ originally gave to it.”  

~ C.S. Lewis

I want to begin with a story. It’s the story of the Church. Once upon a time, and for almost two thousand years, the Church enjoyed a prominent and important place in society, America included. The Church was a culturally significant and respected institution. In this period of time called Christendom the Church stood at the epicenter of culture.

As the center of society, the Church had tremendous authority and influence. Like E.F. Hutton, when the Church spoke, people listened. Universities listened. The Media listened. Businesses listened. Governments listened. These institutions were guided by the wisdom dispensed by the Church. And in many cases, people sought out the Church to find the answers to the big questions of life. And it was the happiest of days for this thing called the Church.

But in the United States, as had already happened in Western Europe, something changed. A seismic shift occurred. The nature of that shift can be illustrated by a seemingly innocuous event one sleepy Sunday evening in Greenville, South Carolina, 1963. That night the Fox Theater defied the state’s time-honored blue laws and opened for business. Unbeknownst to most, Christendom in America was mortally wounded.

In the words of Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, 

“That evening has come to represent a watershed in the history of Christendom…On that night, Greenville, South Carolina—the last pocket of resistance to secularity in the Western world—served notice it would no longer be a prop for the Church. There would be no more free passes for the Church, no more free rides. The Fox Theater went head to head with the Church over who would provide the world view for the young. That night in 1963, the Fox Theater won the opening skirmish.” 

Ever since, the cultural landscape in America has changed dramatically.The Church is no longer the central institution in Western society. It’s been dethroned—marginalized by an increasingly secularized culture. With its influence diminished the Church has now become just one of any number of different places that people go to find Truth and Meaning. Optimistically, a few might still look to the Church for answers. The reality, however, is that the Church has become culturally insignificant.  

Read More

“Sentness” — New Logo

Through the gracious gift of a friend (thanks Paige!) the blog now has a new logo that perfectly captures the visual idea behind “sentness.”

Our lives, informed and shaped by the grace of God through the cross of Christ, necessarily take on a posture that leans away from self and toward others. This centrifugal effect of the gospel upon our lives is what some have called missional-incarnational. I call it “sentness.” It is, or should be, the default posture of every believer.

I’ll be looking to integrate the logo into the blog in the coming weeks. If you have any suggestions about how to do that please comment. Live sent!

Why ‘Sentness’ is Needed

These stats are taken from a friend’s Ph.D dissertation:

34% of the U.S. adult population has not attended any type of church service during the past 6 months

6 out of 10 unchurched people consider themselves to be Christian

1 out of every 3 is unchurched (73 million adults)

Since 1991, the adult population in the US has grown by 15%, and during the same period the number of adults who do not attend church has nearly doubled (39 million to 75 million)

Roughly half of all churches in America didn’t add one new person through conversion growth last year

Without a major shift in the way we ‘do church’ this trend will only continue. If we continue to wait for people to come to us in order to hear the Good News, within the next twenty years we will be a country with a Christian residue only. Live sent!

The Way of Spontaneous Expansion

Recently, I’ve been reading selected writings by Roland Allen from his book The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church. For those of you unfamiliar with Allen, he was an early twentieth century Anglican missionary and missiologist who had a profound influence on Lesslie Newbigin. In many ways, much of the current discussion about the missional church finds its roots in Allen’s writings.

At any rate, Allen is obsessed with (in a good way) trying to understand how and why the early church expanded spontaneously, why the church was spontaneously expanding in the East in his day, and why this spontaneous expansion wasn’t happening in the West. Here’s how Allen defines spontaneous expansion.

I mean the expansion which follows the unexhorted and unorganized activity of individual members of the Church explaining to others the Gospel which they have found for themselves; I mean the expansion which follows the irresistible attraction of the Christian Church for men who see its ordered life, and are drawn to it by desire to discover the secret of a life which they instinctively desire to share; I mean also the expansion of the Church by the addition of new Churches.

Essentially, what Allen describes here is a CPM (Church Planting Movement) and a wonderfully concise description of ‘sentness.’ Allen’s analysis as to why this happened is as insightful as his definition.

The rapid and wide expansion of the Church in the early centuries was due in the first place mainly to the spontaneous activity of individuals. A natural instinct to share with others a new-found joy, strengthened and enlightened by the divine Grace of Christ, the Saviour, inevitably tends to impel men to propagate the Gospel. 

As a pastor, one of the lessons Allen has taught me is that the pastoral task is not to control various ministries. Rather, I need to give up control and instead lead people to be compelled by the Spirit. Because we as pastors have excelled at structuring and programming the Spirit right out of our ministries we simply haven’t given the Holy Spirit the freedom to do what He does best—expand his Church. 

Allen goes on to write:

No one, then, was surprised at the spontaneous efforts of individual Christians to convert others to their Faith. They probably thought it quite natural. Thus as men moved about there were constantly springing up new groups of Christians in different places. The Church expanded simply by organizing these little groups as they were converted, handing on to them the organization which she had received from her first founders. It was itself a unity composed of a multitude of little churches any one of which could propagate itself, and consequently the reception of any new group of Christians was a very simple matter. By a simple act the new group was brought into the unity of the Church, and equipped, as its predecessors had been equipped, not only with all the spiritual power and authority necessary for its own life as an organized unit, but also with all the authority needed to repeat the same process whenever one of its members might convert men in any new village or town. Thus the results of the spontaneous labour of any individual Christian were naturally and easily consolidated and established within the unity of the Church.

Sounds like a decentralized network of house churches or a cell church, doesn’t it? For those of us in the position of helping churches and denominations process what it means to be missional it’s helpful to appeal to Allen. We all want spontaneous expansion. A voice from the distant past sometimes carries more weight with skeptics than the current missional writers who are frequently viewed as following the latest fad in evangelicalism.

So let’s read Allen, let’s ask God to give us ears to hear what Spirit says to the Church, and let’s live out of our ‘sentness’ so that we too might see the spontaneous expansion of God’s church.