take off the skinny jeans and put on your carhartts
There was a philosophy that I heard stated in different ways when I was in youth ministry and every time I heard it, it always drove me a little crazy. That philosophy was something along the lines of “if you can win the quarterback, you will win the school.” And whether stated or unstated, it was the basis of most of the youth ministries I observed. Tons of energy was poured into reaching the cool kids.
Unfortunately, I seem to be noting a similar trend in those desiring to start churches. Portland for whatever reason seems to draw a ton of energy towards church planting. This is not a bad thing.
However most of these church plants tend to get announced in the hip parts of town - downtown, Alberta arts district, along Hawthorne and Belmont, etc. And many of these projects are being announced before those seeking to lead it have even moved in to Portland. This is a bad thing.
Whether intentional or not, it seems that the same philosophy that drove me crazy in youth ministry is now being applied to church planting - “if you can win the hipsters and the upwardly mobile, you’ll win the city.” This may be great for getting you some cred as an edgy pastor and building a brand, but I’m also pretty sure it’s not a great way to build a church.
When one takes this approach, one must invest a multitude of energy into constantly working on the Sunday gathering to be as hip as possible, to always have cutting edge music and an insightful, funny but not too funny, give applications but not too many, make sure you use the Bible but not too much Bible sort of sermon. That’s great and all, but at the end of the day, I’m left wondering if it provides much more opportunity than a kind of cool thing that people can attend once a week.
To cut a little deeper under the “if you win _____ then you win ____” mentality is an assumption that church’s only motivation is to get as many people into your gathering as possible. It’s a great philosophy for establishing a club, but I wonder if it’s a meaningful way for establishing a church.
As Sacred Roots is studying through the Sermon on the Mount this fall, I am repeatedly struck by how much emphasis Jesus puts on life now. Many people’s conception of Christianity seems to be that it is primarily about life after death - get good with Jesus now, so that in the age to come you’ll be good to go. But Jesus seems as concerned with life before life after death. It’s hard to read the Sermon on the Mount with it’s instruction about not being religious bastards and all these applications of life in the here and now and get from that that what we’re about is some sort of idea about just being good boys and girls and waiting for the future. No Jesus seems very concerned with the here and now.
The last passage that I taught through from Jesus’ Sermon had words about not worrying about clothes and food, but rather worrying first about the Kingdom. And if you did that, the other stuff would come too. As I’ve thought about what’s bothering me about church plants right now and our incessant drive to win over the cool people, and the people with money and start cool little gatherings, I’ve begun to wonder if there isn’t also a message for churches in this “seek first the Kingdom” thing.
When Jesus talks about the Kingdom, we hear that good news is to be preached to the poor, we see Jesus telling rich people to give away all they have to love the poor, we hear Jesus telling us to love our neighbors with the same extent we love ourselves. Over and over and over it seems to be that Jesus is sending us on a mission to establish this very different way of life, to seek to serve rather than to be served.
I wonder then, what if we were to make that our point in planting churches, to be outposts of people seeking to live out radically different values - where we use our resources not just for ourselves and our families, but for our neighbors and those less well off. What if instead of trying to build a cool gathering we went about first trying to build groups of people who want to see the best in their neighborhoods, and what if instead of focusing just on the hip neighborhoods we asked, where are there needs and how can we be part of the solution?
We need more church plants like that. We need more Christians like that.
And here’s the exciting part of that, when you take that approach, you start to realize that there are little expressions of the Kingdom all over the place already, there are people who want good in their neighborhoods and there’s folks that are already engaging in projects to better their neighborhoods for themselves and their neighbors. And what we might discover is that we won’t even need to be the people organizing those things, sometimes we just need to come alongside what already is existing and say “this is a beautiful thing, I’m so stoked you’re doing this. How can we help?”
And you know what, if you start living this way, you might even find a few people who are more interested to talk about Jesus with you than when you were just wearing your cool clothes hanging out at the coffee shop and the bar being the cool guy.
So church planters looking at Portland and elsewhere, may I please ask that when you’re thinking about planting you take off your skinny jeans and your cool clothes, put on your carhartts and a ratty t-shirt and get ready to get dirty doing some work for the Kingdom. You might be surprised at the joy you find in that and all the little ways you will see Jesus.
