What: Breaking Through and Reaching Out is sponsored by the Anglican Diocese of the Great Lakes. Clergy and lay leaders alike will gather to discuss the important topics involved with church planting and evangelism in an Anglican context. Speakers include William Beasley; the event also includes workshops and a concert by Heartland Worship Community.

When: Friday, April 27 - Saturday, April 28

Where: St. Thomas Hall, Akron, OH

This year as part of the diocesan Synod, the Anglican Diocese of the Great Lakes is hosting a Church Planting and Evangelism conference in conjuntion with Anglican 1000.

The event will be packed with some amazing guest speakers and events.

For more information including registration, please check out the conference website here.

The time has come to move to the next phase of Anglican 1000 in order to expand upon God’s call to spread His Church.

As one of the primary ministries of the Anglican Church in North America, Anglican 1000 has grown immensely since its inception in 2009.  Following Archbishop Duncan’s prophetic call for 1000 new congregations during his investiture, more than 200 new works have been planted, many with the assistance and support of Anglican 1000.

Canon David Roseberry, along with the Rev. Daniel Adkinson and other key leaders have helped to grow Anglican 1000 into a collaborative effort by rectors, bishops, dioceses, networks and others who are embracing the call to plant churches.

As with any new ministry, the time has come to move to the next phase in order to expand upon God’s call to spread His Church.  Working towards this next phase, the central leadership role and office of Anglican 1000 is moving to the Provincial office located just outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

This new role, the Vicar (Provincial Director) for Anglican 1000, will be the “provincial catalyst for making church planting the central enterprise of the Anglican Church in North America” explained Archbishop Duncan.

Archbishop Duncan’s closing message at the 2012 Anglican 1000 Church Planting Summit addressed the history of the church, spiritual warfare, remaining a movement, and “reaching 1000.” Click here to hear audio of his address.

The Vicar will serve Anglican 1000 in raising up an ever-increasing number of Anglican congregations and communities of faith to reach the men, women and children of North America with the transforming love of Jesus Christ.

If you are interested in learning more, a full job description can be found here.  Application materials will be accepted until Easter Sunday, April 8, 2012.

Please join us in praying for this vital new phase in the life of the Anglican 1000 movement.

In my life of speaking at conferences, my recent time with the church planters at the Anglican 1000 Summit is at the top. Wow, what a wonderful time for me. Where to begin?

First, thanks to Daniel Adkinson (@DLAdkinson) and to the good folks at Christ Church Plano Texas for the invitation and the opportunity to participate in this drive to plant 1000 new Anglican churches this decade.  The good news is that 200+ have been planted in the last two years.

Second, in pondering a topic for this conference I chose to speak to neglected workers (church planters) about neglected pastoral texts in the New Testament, and that meant I focused on James 3:1-4:12 and on Colossians 1:24-2:5. There is so much pastoral theology in those verses, and the NT doesn’t focus so much on techniques or strategies as on message and character. But some of the themes these texts surface are not themes we often focus on in pastoral work. So, the texts have something fresh for all of us.

Third, surely a highlight for me was meeting everyone — from Archbishop Robert Duncan and Rector David Roseberry and Daniel to Katie Boone and Cathy Carey and Jennifer Roach and David Taylor and Mike Breen and Erik Willits (@erikwillits, my exceptional host and a fellow Pretzel from Freeport IL) and so many pastors who said encouraging words — and hearing daily reports from church planters on what is going on. There is a real sense of fellowship in the gospel among these folks.

And, yes, you knew it was coming: the liturgy and order whenever those Anglicans gather together.  I told them I was an Anabaptist Anglican, which stretches the meaning of both words, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying the prayer times and the music and the liturgical sense. And then Wednesday night I got to preach in the worship service in Christ Church — and what a wonderful time of worship, singing, eucharist, preaching and dedicating all those church planters. If you are in the Dallas area, do give yourself a life experience of attending worship at Christ Church. (But be careful, you might decide that Book of Common Prayer is the way to go!)

Please join us in praying for this vital new phase in the life of the Anglican 1000 movement.

There was a moment some time ago in Durham cathedral doing some grad work, a moment of prophetic insight, when the bishop stood up in this glorious cathedral and he had a tie mike attached to his stole, and as he was preparing for the service he tapped it and said “there’s something wrong with this” and the congregation said “and also with you”

[Laughter.]

I want to connect discipleship and mission and find a way to help and serve you as you plant churches. I am committed to this movement worldwide of planting. I am committed to seeing the bride of Christ grow worldwide. Now is the moment when if we apply the correct methodology we will see a breakthrough in this generation that will last far into the future.

To do that we need to know what we are about. I will offer what I have learned with my wife and family over the years. Based on our understanding of the bible as we’ve sought to apply God’s word in different contexts.

One observation I would like to make is that our present operating system is incorrect and did not help us.

I am an Apple aficionado. My children introduced me to Apple by buying me an iPod. To this day I only have one iTunes account and my kids are using it. But when they first showed it to me, I asked what it was. They said, ‘it’s an iPod.’

“Do I put it in a machine?” I asked?

“No,” they said, “it’s a digital thing.”

It had a tiny screen on it. They said I could watch TV shows on it. They showed me. It was so clear, I was awestruck.

So we got one.

They put the two TV shows they thought would be most appropriate for me: “Monk” and “Lost.”

Maybe, I thought, it’s because they are being prophetic.

The first time I experimented with my iPod on my own was on an international flight to New Zealand. I put the “Lost” program on. It’s predicated on a plane crash on an international flight. I am looking at this thing thinking ‘May they not be prophetic, Lord.’

From that point I was gripped by Apple.

If you’ve not read the book “Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts and Minds” by Guy Kawasaki who used to be what some people call “the chief evangelist” of Apple, you should read it. It is absolute genius about how we present ourselves to the world. 

I am a product of Apple’s “enchantment”.  I found myself using the products and knowing the corporation that produced them.

Some years ago, before he died, I read a biography of Steve Jobs.

Jobs left Apple at one point because, like many genius’, he couldn’t get along with anyone. People asked him, “what are you going to do?”

His answer at the time, “Create the world’s greatest Operating System” (hereafter OS).

“What language are you going to use?” they asked

“Linux” he said, which blew people away.
This is a labyrinthine language no one at the time had been able to use. It was more of a museum piece.

So he went off trying to use this remarkable language and, ultimately, wrestled it to the ground and came back with. He came back with OS X. 

Afterwards, Apple purchased it and effectively purchased him.

The CEO stepped down a little bit later and after he left in walked Steve Jobs into the board room and he said, “From now on, everything is going to change.”

He knew how the OS worked and how to design “killer apps” for it.

So there is a programming language, an OS, a Graphic User Interface which is the means by which the user is able to connect with the information and use the killer apps that are available.

If we were to ask, “what is it the OS of Jesus?” we might give ourselves a chance at being effective at planting churches.

Jesus’  “Programing language” is the bible—the written Word was used by the Living Word. He referred all the time to the bible.

As I’ve studied the scriptures, my sense is that the bible is written in a binary code: There is an “invitation” to relationship with God and there is a “challenge” to take responsibility with that…

There are “Covenant Relationships” and “Kingdom Responsibilities”…a sort of double helix of Covenant and Kingdom.
What is Jesus’ OS? Discipleship. This is what Jesus talks about all the time. He invites people to follow him in the beginning and at the end he challenges them, sends them to do what he has been doing with them.

“Go make disciples and teach them to do all I have taught you to do.” His OS is to make disciples.

What is Jesus’ Graphic User Interface (GUI): His GUI is his teachings and parables. He imprints pictures and stories in the minds of the disciples.

Jesus’ “killer app” is the church.

I want to suggest that 99% of all Anglican clergy have a different OS.

Our OS is the church using the church itself and we hope to produce the “killer app” of discipleship.

We try to build the church and get disciples.

Not surprisingly we find it very hard.

The reason is that we are not submitted to the methodology of Jesus. We are submitted to his Lordship but not his strategy.

It is unmistakable. He makes disciples and gets the church. We reverse that.

A disciple, let me just define that term, is one aspiring to be identified with the character and competency of Christ.

Here’s the thing, our methodology is more defined often by the Enlightenment than by the bible.

It is important for disciples to have the right information. And it is important that we give people the freedom to innovate with that information.  Have a go with it.

The means by which we get to innovation is imitation. That’s the biblical pattern.
Turn with me to 1st Corinthians 4:14-17:

“I do not write these things to make you ashamed, but to admonish you as my beloved children. 15 For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel. 16 I urge you, then, be imitators of me. 17 That is why I sent you Timothy, my beloved and faithful child in the Lord, to remind you of my ways in Christ, as I teach them everywhere in every church.”

Let me contextualize what we are reading.

The word “disciple” disappears from the New Testament in Acts 21. That seems strange since discipleship is the Great Commission. There is no doubt that Jesus wants us to make disciples. But why does the word disappear?

Because the church by the time we get to Corinth and Galatia, the church has travelled beyond the cultural heartland of the holy land and the picture, the metaphor of “rabbi and disciple” no longer works.

No one knows what a rabbi is in Corinth.

They understand the Socratic method of teaching and training but Paul has to draw another metaphor that will build the church so that it does the right thing and the metaphor he chooses is the metaphor of the parent and the child.

The leaders are to function as spiritual parents. Paul describes himself as a father and a mother but more regularly as a father. And in drawing this metaphor into the place of discipleship he is able to reinforce what a discipling relationship really is.

So then in Acts there was a synagogue ruler, Sosthenese, who brought Paul before the Roman procurator Gallio. Gallio does not take action against the Christians as many in the synagogue had wanted him to do, so Sosthenese get’s beat up outside the Roman courtroom. 

It seems to have led him on a journey to Jesus. He is one of the church leaders in Corinth. He tells Paul things are not going well.

“I do not write these things to make you ashamed, but to admonish you as my beloved children. 15 For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers…”

Paul wants to underline the necessary component of imitation. 

I am English. We have a real problem about being thought of as taking the limelight or being center stage. We find that all too American frankly. We tend to be very deferential.

So if I am working with European or English leaders and I am saying to them: I want you to ask yourself: 1. Do I have a life that anyone wants? 2. Is anyone imitating that life? This causes massive level of consternation. I can see it on their brows. For us to be the imitable model means we have a life that others want and that means someone is demonstrating that they want our life by imitation.

This is precisely what is expected of a disciple following a rabbi like Jesus. Imitation is deeply ingrained in rabbinical culture…we don’t just want to know what the rabbi knows but we want to be what the rabbi is. The only way that happens in through imitation.

Paul knows that but he knows that the rabbi metaphor won’t work so he gives a clear picture that all will understand. He uses the word pedagogue. We misunderstand what the role of the pedagogy was. When a child was weaned, it is put into the care, for much of daily life, of the pedagogue, and he deals with writing reading and arithmetic.

We call them the three R’s. The pedagogue gives the necessary info the child will need to progress to the next stage. Numbers, letters, all taught by the pedagogue.

Then at 12yrs, the child is brought with ceremony to the parent of its gender, let’s say it’s a girl, she’s placed at the shoulder of her mother. From then on she is to learn the incredibly difficult task of managing the oikos, the Greco-Roman household. It was the mother who oversaw and ruled this incredibly complex organization. The girl would watch and observe and when she got married, she would how to manage the oikos, because from 12 till her marriage she’s watched and imitated everything.

The son is taken to the shoulder of his father. He learns the trade or the craft of his household.
Paul stood at the shoulder of his father the tentmaker. The boy learned the craft and trade of the house and it took years of imitation.

You have lots of people, says Paul, who can function as a pedagogue, but you need to grow up, graduate from the pedagogue to the parent. Your life is no longer about information but imitation.

He gives the perfect example here in this text. He sends his “son” Timothy. Not his natural son. Timothy was handed to Paul by his mom and grandma. He becomes his spiritual son. Look how Paul describes Timothy, much the same way the father speaks of the divine son at Baptism.

If you look at him you will see me, says Paul. He will remind you of my way. So when you see Timothy, you will remember what you heard through what you see in Timothy.
This is imitation. The problem for us is that we have focused exclusively because of the enlightenment on information. Unsurprisingly we find it difficult to produce disciples. You do, in reality, have disciples. All kinds of people watch you. 

I was in the bathroom shaving years ago and I looked around and Libby who was 4 was beside me. She had soap all of over her face like shaving cream. She had picked up a comb and was “shaving”. She said, ‘when do I get to do this daddy?’ I said, ‘Not yet’.

There is a desperate desire in the child to imitate the parent. There are people all around who want to imitate you. Do you give that access, that opportunity? Do you structure your life so that you can actually make disciples so that people can have time to imitate you? Or are you a bit busy and overrun by the things of the kingdom?

There is only one thing Jesus is counting. He’s not counting average attendance or programs or even the good things you do. He is counting disciples.

Questions
1.  Are you creating a context where disciples can be made by you?   
2.  Are your disciples making disciples?

Unless you’ve figured out what’s happening in this exchange between you and your disciples, you’ll not be able to teach them to make disciples. If you make disciples, you will get the church. If you build the church there is no guarantee you will get disciples.

So let’s press in further.

I am an Anglican clergyman this is as challenging as it can get. Let’s think, how did Jesus make disciples? What did he do?

Well, in my view, he lived out his programming language, scripture, though his OS—discipleship.

He made an invitation and then calibrated a challenge to commensurate with it.

You can see him making an invitation and then a challenge over and over again.

His earthly ministry is framed out by it. In the beginning, he issues the invitation: Repent, believe the good news. Peter, John, come and follow me. That’s invitation. 

At the end of the ministry, standing on the mountain of the Ascension, he says, all authority is given to me therefore, go make disciples of all nations…” Therefore, “go”. That’s challenge.

Jesus is constantly calibrating invitation to challenge. So on the last night before his crucifixion, he says to his disciples, the New Covenant I’m establishing says you and I are one. So that you get this I am taking these familiar Passover elements, bread and wine, and making them the Covenant meal between us (Invitation) and when I am no longer with you, “Do this” in remembrance of me (challenge).

The morning after Jesus casts a demon out in a synagogue in Capernaum, people are crowding, they look for him, he’s gone. They hunt and he’s nowhere. He is up on a mountain, he is always running back to his Father. We’ve been looking for you they say, there are huge crowds wanting to see you. Let’s buy a tent, we’ll have a revival meeting every day. We’ll have a book contract, this will be awesome.

And Jesus says, let’s go somewhere else. He’s always throwing them off balance. So off they go.

Then he sends them out. They’ve seen him do all these amazing things, healing, casting out demons, teaching, and he sends them to do the very things that he has been doing.

So they go out and they see amazing things happen and they come back. It appears the crowds come back after the disciples, following them back to Jesus, and they even prevent the disciples from eating. And Jesus looks at the crowds and says, let’s get some rest. If you harmonize this episode with Matthew 11, he says at this point, come to me all you who are burdened and heavy laden, learn from me, (the word for learn there is, ‘mathetes’ or ‘disciple’)”. Let’s go on retreat.

They go across the lake. The crowd runs around the lake, they circle around before the disciples and Jesus and meet them.

There are 5000 families. The disciples are thinking, let’s get rid of them. Jesus teaches them for the whole day. Disciples are trying to find a way to send them off, “It’s late, Lord, I think you should let them get something to eat.”

Jesus says, no they’ll faint on the way so let’s feed them what have you’ve got.

Read Matthew’s account. They get into this huddle, this circle and Jesus puts bread in their hands and says “go and feed them.”

Is that challenge? Yes

I was on the way back from a ski trip. We went to the Black Forest with a group of kids. All of them spent all their money in the first day. On the bus home, toward the end of a 24 hour ride, we wound up in Belgium. There’s nothing to eat in Belgium. We finally find a sort of cafeteria 11pm at night. The kids are starving. I’d already spent all my money on them.

“Give me all your money,” I said. They do. It comes out to about 20 cents. So I prayed and I told them “I want you to pray.” It was the most intense prayer that they had ever prayed I’m sure. As I walked passed through the cafeteria on the way to order food, the diners, people from all over Europe put money into my hands. By the time I got to the counter I had enough to buy dinner and not only that, but enough for all and for the rest of the journey.

“You feed them.” Jesus is giving you the invitation and the challenge all the time.

What I have noticed is that those who have identified this OS identify what God has written into his creation from the beginning.

Monty Roberts is the most famous horse trainer in the world. He was trained by his father who broke horses for a living. It turns out his father used the same methods on him that he used on horses. He broke him. 

His dad would “sack” the horse, terrify it until it had its spirit was broken.

Monty saw that is dad was using this method to raise him.

One day Monty watched the way horses interacted. He saw a strange horse, even strong stallions approached a new group of horses with deference. When a new horse approached, the lead mare would separate from the heard. She would challenge the new individual. As he comes closer, he bows his head in deference. At that moment she opens her flank inviting him in. When he comes forward, she challenges again, then the newcomer again acts deferentially, like a baby in some respects, dipping his head, pawing…this is repeated until the two meet face to face, muzzle to muzzle and the new horse is invited into the group and becomes a part of it.

Monty saw this and he said, ‘I can do that’.

Today, Monty is older. The longest it takes him to train a normal wild horse from completely wild to bit and bridle and saddle is 16 minutes.

The following is a 4 min edit [the first 4 minutes of the video below] of Monty training an abused horse which took him longer. It took 23 minutes. This is what Jesus is doing in your life.

The BBC did a documentary on Monty Roberts. He’s cracked the code of something that has not been done among western people for many years. Here is Monty doing something that is tremendously engaging, as you watch it there is something opening in your heart.

You think, that’s just so right. 

The BBC did this documentary. They noticed that there are bleachers around the round pen and people come to watch him train horses. Some of his staff goes into the crowd because many break down in tears. BBC asked him about it. He said, “We’ve noticed that the people who were abused in their lives are the ones who break down.”

Jesus is using this code of invitation into covenant and challenge to represent the king in his kingship, he invites you in to be with the King. This means you also become an imitator and then someone imitates you and you extend his kingship.

He wants us to know how this happens so we can share it with others. The issue is not whether you have disciples. You have them. The question is whether your disciples will know how to make disciples.
We are going to complete our time today, I’d just encourage you to be stretched just one bit further.  I am going to create a matrix with two axis—like a cross.

High invitation is at the top of the first.
Below, at the bottom of the first axis is Low invitation.

The horizontal axis is “challenge”.
At the far right we have “high challenge.”
And at the far left we have “low challenge.”

Jesus calibrates invitation to challenge creating a culture where it is possible to create high invitation and high challenge. His kingdom exists in the top right grid between high challenge and high invitation.

When we look at mission tomorrow, we will see how it relates to what I have here. But for now, what do you have if you have “high invitation” and “low challenge” over here on the top left grid, what do you produce?

You produce Anglicanism. Cozy but utterly without challenge. Come on in, but there’s nothing you have to do.

If discipleship happens on the high right grid, then clearly Anglicans who are mostly invitation are clearly unable to disciple. English people are unable to challenge people. You Americans seem to have picked up the virus. It is difficult to live in a culture of challenge.

If you have a high challenge and low invitation culture, the bottom right grid, you create a stress culture with discouragement. A “do this” culture without much relationship or love or reward. Church planting teams can sometimes be an example of this.

If you have low invitation and low challenge culture, then you get The Episcopal Church.  We’re all bored because there’s no challenge, that would be intolerant, but at the same time, you’re only able to fit in if you’re already one of us. There’s no real invitation.  It’s for the in crowd but there is no challenge for the crowd that is in. So people “belong” formally but no one goes.

It is possible for us to live in any of these cultures and to produce any of them. Here’s the problem. You cannot go directly from a high invitation, low challenge culture, which is where most of us are today, into a high challenge high invitation culture overnight. And it hurts to do it.

For us to calibrate challenge to produce a real discipleship culture, we must take some of the energy from “invitation” and invest it in challenge…you are invited but to be a disciple you must serve, give, and participate in a small group. That’s challenge and it’s hard because it feels like you are withdrawing the invitation.

We call this the valley of the shadow of death.

People don’t like it. People don’t like to be challenged.

It is the place where we stop talking “about” the Shepherd and start talking “to” the Shepherd. In the valley. we say “your rod and staff comfort me”…challenge and invitation. The “rod and the staff”, two instruments of the shepherd, invitation and challenge, that is what drives and draws the sheep into the valley and beside still waters.

We’ll talk more about this in tomorrow’s session.

I am not a church planter. I don’t feel called to it but you have my prayers and respect. I hope what I share will be helpful to the work you do.

[Starts with a quote from Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics. I could not type fast enough get all of it, but here is the gist]

“In the death of Christ, God the Creator and Lord of life takes the lost cause of man out of his hand, makes it his own and intervenes majestically and wisely. What arises is not random joy but qualified joy. Joy has been destroyed on the one hand and reconstituted on the other but then raised to the level of a command. Joy is now before the Lord and in him but it is a genuine earthly and human joy—wedding, harvest, victory, wine-drinking, eating bread, play, speak and dance, as well as pray. We must remember that the man who hears and takes to heart the biblical message is forbidden to be anything but merry and cheerful.”

Such a beautiful statement. What if we took Barth’s ideas about joy and used them with a different linguistic key? What would it sound like as poetry? What would it sound like?

[four stanzas of “Ode to Joy” are projected onto the screen]

These four lines of poetry say almost as much as Barth’s surging swelling Germanic text. The metaphoric language captures our experience of joy not against Barth but with him. What if we not only read it but also sing it? Let’s sing the verses together.

[The audience sings with piano accompaniment]

What happened when we added music to poetry? We experienced the way song has two functions:

1. Concentration
2. Representation.

Song concentrates human emotion and compresses it into choice select images.

Hearts unfurling like flowers. Chanting birds. Morning stars as choirs.

We sing this song as representation too. It represents exactly what we always wanted to say about this particular kind of joy. This melody and these words give language to what we want to say but can’t often can’t in mere prose. 
What if we made one more adjustment and change not just the mode but the posture in which we sing?

What if we turned our bodies toward one another and lifted our hands and sang this song?

You will have to bear with me. You’re all third graders and I’m your teacher.

[Crowd stands up and one half of crowd faces the other half lifting their arms. They sing again]

We could go on and on adding dancers, adding instrumentals, singing it in Spanish, Swahili, but suffice it to say that where we ended is not where we began. We shifted from analytical, to metaphorical, from talking about joy to incorporating joy into our bodies. We began by hearing Barth’s exegesis of gladness and we responded by enacting gladness.  In short what we’ve done is to taste what the arts have to offer corporate worship.

Question: How does liturgical art, any art in the context of worship, not only compliment but enable the congregation to do what it otherwise would not do?

Does it not bring something that the congregation could not otherwise do?

The liturgical arts serve to deepen our interactive imaginative purpose but also they disciple the whole person in their own way but not their own terms:

We have 4 tasks.

1. To answer the question, what are the problems that confront liturgical arts
2. Provide a working definition of liturgical art in corporate worship
3. To describe the contribution of liturgical arts to worship and the life of the congregation
4. To examine a case study
I.    There are 2 problems that confront liturgical arts and that can be addressed through them

1. The allure of “right ideas”: The thinking that says “if we can rationally persuade through preaching, the disciples will figure it out.” This is brain on a stick theology. Here the presumed relationship is, “you get your theory right then the actions flow out of that.” We see people in this theory sitting and absorbing information.

This approach fails to look like a biblical vision of worship. We don’t think our way through to action. Action flows from a nexus of loves, longings, and habits that huddle under the hood, that move us sometimes without consciously thinking about it.

This mentalist approach fails to change those hidden dynamics that happen Monday thru Saturday with movies and billboards that capture our imaginations, and causes that move us to action and magazines that move our affections, and with damaging appetites, what confidence do we have in sermons, do they have a fighting chance to change our lives in the face of these?

A mentalist approach seems to approach worship like science or math rather than basketball

Basketball involves science, but you cannot become a great player by sitting in a classroom listening to basketball lectures. You learn by doing. This “doing” is a relational embodied thing that habituates you to do basketball….ritual automates a feel for the game.

Worship is more like basketball than math. You do and engage and practice and you acquire a feel for the game.

2.    The second problem is the poverty of small ideas about liturgical arts. What would it look like if I took Roseberry’s talk from yesterday and turned it into a hymn. I want you to know David that the HS inspired me and I was on my bed and it came to me by dictation from the HS.

Quotes a hymn text he wrote as a response to David’s talk.

1000 churches sometimes lurches
Speed bumps, potholes, things go awry
Yet here we are: a net together, not alone, not a fly
Team work, hard work, guess work, cold work
Jesus, master and commander
Blessing WEDCAP, weak boy network
AMEN
[laughter]

[he puts it to song and sings it]

This is all fun, but what happens when it goes wrong? Behind my ideas of God as Father, for example, is an image…if I put this into art, the real thing might be broken by my image.

So here is what art can become in worship if it is merely an expression of what I feel about God:

“I just want to feel you and gotta love you cause I can’t help myself, I just wanna be with you…”

This is a disordered expression emotion that actually serves to break or twist the thing trying to be expressed…love for God into a very self-centered vision
What will counter this?

What kind of leadership do we need?

Leadership capable of concentrating and representing the affections of the person and finding ways to order them and by helping them enter into holistic practices.

Which brings us to the second task

2.Worship: defining liturgy in corporate worship?

[He gives three different quotes as answers that he read too fast too copy—will try to get them]

Liturgical arts in corporate worship should serve to form our whole persons, from the inside and in symbolic fashion.

3rd task: describe the contribution of liturgical arts to worship and the life of the congregation

When St. Gregory of Nazianzus says “What God has not assumed he has not healed” he means that Christ has healed us in taking on our form, our nature in the Incarnation. The desire is to find ways to get our whole person to fit into the healing work of God. Liturgical arts are able ways of doing this…by bringing our bodies into intentional and intensive expressions of worship.

Liturgical action, helps us to rightly order our affections—saying the Psalms, kneeling and standing—these train the heart and the body. The visual work, for example, of viewing and contemplating paintings of Christ’s resurrection fixates our eyes and minds on God’s sovereign power over the physical creation over and against Docetism.

The goal is for a fitting concentration and representation of all our faculties so that all affections are positively engaged in an ordered way.
This forms us from the inside by offering us experiences from the inside. Scriptures offer analogy. Jesus and the young lawyer in Luke 10:25-3…Jesus tells a story because that is the best way to communicate neighborly love. So rather than just giving the facts, Jesus uses a story to draw the lawyer subversively into the truth. He makes the lawyer feel the truth. A twist occurs and the lawyer finds himself implicated as the bad guy not the good guy.

In worship we can talk about the importance of our bodies or we can set them into movement. We can talk about baptism of the imagination or we can give them good things to look at.

Good sermons perform a good service. They are important yet when we provide opportunities for our imaginations to be formed in the inside…we see that we can create actors rather than spectators.

Habitual reforming of behavior through liturgy will symbolically form us. Our bodies possess inertias and some of them are dysfunctional. I have an anxious friend. You can see it on his forehead. So when a priest processes and is preceded by the crucifer, this is a symbolic dramatic movement—this says, this is what our bodies are for. When we cross ourselves it’s a way to remind our hearts that we live a cruciform life in all places.

Exercise: pretend you are coming home after a long day, find your favorite couch and slouch in it. Now stay slouched.

[everyone slouches]

Now we say Psalm 51 in a slouched position.

That is one way of saying such this great psalm…but notice it doesn’t feel right.

There is something about our bodies that is yearning for a physical expression of confession of sin when we read psalm 51.

So let’s say it on our knees.

[whole crowd kneeling says the psalm in unison]. 

Some of the things we do have a symbolic function that train us in a way of seeing the rest of our lives. 

How about our affections? We do not improve or form our emotions by simply letting them do what they will do. Our malformed emotions do not know what to do with themselves. We pout, envy, hate etc.

When we sing songs of lament, whether we feel it or not, it is a way of saying, this is what our affections are for. We are to feel a right “this” kind of sorrow or anger and express it in this way. When a persecuted church sings All Creatures of our God and King it is a way of waking our hearts to the anticipation of joy regardless of circumstance. We are teaching our emotions how to order themselves and express themselves in keeping with God’s design for them…to be used to glorify him.

Exercise: [Psalm 98:4-6 is projected onto the screen]

“Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth; break forth into joyous song and sing praises!  Sing praises to the Lord with the lyre, with the lyre and the sound of melody! With trumpets and the sound of the horn make a joyful noise before the King, the Lord!”

Say it in a whisper together.

[audience says psalm together whispering]

You sounded lame.

This time do it in your best “Data” impersonation from Star Trek—as woodenly as possible. Monotone.

[Crowd does it]

Okay, stand up, let us be doers of the word and shout.

[audience shouts out the psalm]

That was wonderful. Thank you.

Again shouting does not make you more of a Christian but this allows our bodies and imaginations to enter into the truths of scripture. There is something wholesome about shouting in church.

“We do not see reality by just opening our eyes. Our eyes need to be trained to see truth”[paraphrase] (Stanley Hauerwas)

So what happens to a community shaped by catacomb art—martyrdom art in which Jesus is seen conquering death and the grave? These act as counter-narratives to the emperor cult…they charge the community with a vision that sustains it through suffering. There is a Ruler enthroned in the heavens, above Caesar, risen from the dead.

Sometimes our people need something positive to gaze upon, to liven the heart.

Third exercise: Eph 4:4-6
“There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”

Let’s stand and say it together…

[The audience stands and recites the text]

He asks a man to stand in the center of the room. Everyone is told to turn away from him.

Say the text again.

[The crowd does so]

How does that feel?

This is sometimes the way that churches worship. As if their bodies are turned away from each other. So let’s try the opposite. Everyone turn toward him now.

A sanctuary with chairs shaped in a circular form allows a congregation to see that we are in this together. It’s not magic but what does it mean to arrange our space in the way that we face away from each other? What if we could arrange our space in a way that reflects what we say and sing?

The liturgical arts form us in their own way from the inside and in their own fashion.

4.    Case study: What does it mean for a congregation to pray with the eyes and not just the ears?

Laura Jennings came to display her art in our church. I explained to our congregation that Laura’s work was not just an ornament but it is intended to help us see the gospel afresh and in doing so we could be inspired to live out the gospel afresh.

Laura’s art depicted groups we often overlook. War victims and less known people groups. It was more than the subject matter that challenged us, it was the style…more abstract than literal. Some folks only saw strange shapes and colors. Others just saw decorations. Others took the time to look over and over and again, they persevered…for them meaning unfolded over time. Unseen things resolved into material shapes. By showing us pixelated bodies Laura’s art reminded us we cannot see people rightly just by looking at them. Our sight is damaged and needs mending.

The subjects were things she taught us we could feel sad or angry about. Her art also allowed us to see that God is in fact present in suffering. Her art challenged us to love the poor and needy. In experiencing Laura’s art in lent the congregation was given the ability to see the poor in gospel ways. We prayed with our eyes and were changed.

Was it magical, or immediate? No. It was a slow process…due in some part to the long training process. We’d done a lot of training. We saw that the sanctification of our eyes would need to take place over a long time. We would need to create a culture.

If liturgical art disciplines us in anything in particular, it helps us to see the people nearby who we usually have no desire to see… but now we could see them with a simple sympathetic love.

Hawerawas said that God is the Lord of history means we must be able to joyfully imagine that things need to change and will not be as they are now (my paraphrase)

The lion will eventually lie down with the lamb.

The victim of war need no longer be the outcast.

For us with Laura’s art, it meant looking through art to the broken people who lived across the sea but also helped us see them in the next pew as well. It enabled us to set ourselves into a redemptive story that not only permits us to act but forbids us to do anything but be merry and cheerful as we do so in the world our circumstances notwithstanding.

Question: by God’s grace and opportunity…what opportunities are we giving our people to have their bodies discipled by how they move? And what opportunities are we giving them to have their affections rightly habituated by what they are invited to feel? And what opportunities are we giving them to have their imaginations formed by what they see?

[laughter]

It’s an honor to be here. I consider myself an Anabaptist, non-conformist Anglican.

I feel like I am among the nonconformist Anglicans. I would love to go to an Anglian church. If you plant one in Liberty I’ll go. I go to an Anglican church every once in a while for a liturgical fix. But when we went on Easter we heard that Jesus was not raised from the dead after some wonderful texts on the Resurrection.

[groans and laughter]

I pondered what to say to this group and what I’ve decided to do is to talk about neglected texts in the NT for pastors. I have been looking forward to talking about pastoral letters in the pages of the NT that are regularly neglected. The advantage is they tell us what they want to tell us but the disadvantage is that they also tell us things we may not want to know or be interested in.

I appreciate topical sermons but the problem is the lack of exposition. The advantage of topical sermons is that people come to church. The disadvantage of expositional preaching, preaching the bible, is that people do not come to church.

New Testament texts do not teach techniques for planting churches. I’ve read the history of evangelism and revivalism the in US which is, unfortunately, a history of technique.

It was not so in the First Great Awakening. These were men deeply steeped in scripture, preaching the bible expositionally.

Later, after that, Finney, introduced a focus on technique and he believed that if you used the appropriate techniques you could facilitate conversions.

Jonathan Edwards was not the same. Jonathan Edwards was absorbed with the beauty and glory of God, not just burning spiders. He crafted sermons grounded in scripture and designed to bring out the meaning of the word of truth.

Finney, however, was profoundly theological, I don’t mean to give the wrong impression, some of his sermons have 37 points. He was a lawyer who knew how to make points.

It was later under Billy Sunday that we began to learn to create a spectacle. This is where evangelism and planting began to go downhill. 

This was given to us through Billy Graham and Bill Bright and the Four Spiritual Laws. If we do the right things the right results will come about. We are pragmatists and we easily become technique shaped people.
The NT does not talk about techniques…but character and the power of the gospel.

I want begin my time with you by looking at James 3:1-4:12.

This is the earliest pastoral letter in the NT. For a defense of this theory check out my commentary…don’t have to read it just buy it.

James is addressing, this is the brother of Jesus, James is an address to the hot heads in the church. In James 1:19-21, he says…

“Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.”

Human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires.

In the letter he is addressing people for whom anger produces violence. James actually turns against hotheaded people and says “you murder”. It is only because of our niceties that we don’t think it means really murder. But for a 1st century Jew, the hot heads believed that putting people to death really was a good resolution to theological conflict. These guys were more than willing to murder to advance the truth.

It is in that context that he is speaking, addressing young pastoral hot heads with ambition, who want to solve the problems of the world. Even if this section is not for pastors it is for pastors since it is the word of God is for all people. Let me make some points for pastors from our text beginning in James 3.

1. What you say matters. James 3:1-12 is an excurses on the tongue…saying some things we’d rather the bible not say. The bible says many things about the tongue…what we say matters. The first time I learned this was in college, a friend said, “It was because of what you said that I got married”.

I remembered what I said. Nevermind that at the time I was a junior and he hassled me about why got married so young and I was taking a course in 1 Corinthians and so I said in response to him that it was “better to marry than to burn” was a jest…that response, my response, is what compelled him to get married.

What we say matters.

I have a blog. I have 8300 posts. 165,000 comments are there. 16,000 spam comments. I hate spammers. I have 250,000 page views amongst 200,000 people who visit. I live on words.

What we say matters.

I have one post that is deeply embarrassing but was fun when I wrote it. It lasted 45 minutes on my blog. It was called “The Blinker and his Wife.” It was about Joel Osteen who I think blinks too much and I thought that was worth saying in public when he got in trouble in an airplane.

That was inconsistent with the “Jesus Creed” theme of loving neighbor as yourself.

The last thing I want is everyone calling him the blinker because I said so. The principle is that people are listening. You may think they are not. They are. At least some of them are.

James in vv1-2, poignantly, Baptists don’t know that word, Anglicans will be able to understand it I think… James says that the tongue is an indicator of the maturity level.

“Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For we all stumble in many ways. And if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, fable also to bridle his whole body.”

Not many, he says, should be teachers. James is not trying to discourage the number of teachers…but he is saying you need to take it seriously. He is speaking to leaders of the church in his community.

Not many should teach because we who teach will be judged more severely. The potency of words is the reason.

“For we all stumble in many ways. And if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, fable also to bridle his whole body…”

James believes that our control of the tongue indicates our spirituality and the measure of how far we have grown in the Christian life.

I know of no discipleship program that says this.

You and I live off of speaking and talking, preaching and teaching, and so it is more important for us to know that the tongue really matters.

“If we put bits into the mouths of horses so that they obey us, we guide their whole bodies as well. 4Look at the ships also: though they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. 5So also the tongue is a small member, yet hit boasts of great things.

How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! 6And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell. 7 For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, 8 but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.”

Vv3-8, a series of images….the tongue is more powerful than we will ever know. He compares it to a bit in a horse, a rudder in ship, and spark in a fire. In v.6 the tongue could be a world of dissolution, corrupting the body…set on fire by hell. Strong language about the capacity of the tongue to set a community on fire, violence, dissolution.

We need to be careful about our rhetoric. People are up in arms about Limbaugh but this is where we are as a culture…it’s the sort of shock rhetoric that people think is the only way to get attention. The soothing rhetoric of Jesus is less attention getting but in the long term it brings grace and wisdom.

James opines and worries in v. 9 about the polarity of the tongue:

“With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.”

The tongue has the capacity to create things, and you know that, as you lead and spread grace and what grace language does to people.

James wants us to realize that as teachers of the word of God we need to know that what we say matters. Maybe we should take this principle from James and say ours should be, “Don’t say anything that could go viral.” That gets to be embarrassing. We can reweet it and it spreads like fire, like the fire of the tongue. We could learn from James to attend to the viral nature of what we say.
I want to go through some more points.
2.    Teachers should aim at creating wisdom communities. We live a world infatuated with youth culture. 65 year olds get tattoos not because they should but because 25 year olds do. Some wear skinny jeans which is embarrassing. 65 year olds should wear pleated pants. That’s how it works.
A wisdom culture is a different kind. I values older people and says there is wisdom in age. We value the older people because they have been there, been through it and have words of wisdom about life. James is into wisdom.
“13Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good conduct let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom.”
v. 13 who is wise? He’s not asking about PhD’s. Let them show wisdom by a good life and humility. What is wisdom in the OT? Living in God’s world in God’s way. In the OT wisdom is shaped by Torah, the law, the wisdom of those who practice Torah. By the NT wisdom has been reconfigured by way of the fulfillment of the old. The way Apple computer fulfills a manual typewriter…not Dell which rhymes with hell.
Wisdom in the NT, if OT wisdom is “living in God’s world in God’s way,” in the NT, wisdom is living in God’s world in keeping with the gospel, the life and words of Jesus Christ. The gospel reshapes wisdom.
When you write a commentary on James you meet a friend and when you send it off you lose your friend. I got into it like Gollum and his ring.
One think I love is the echoes of Jesus in every paragraph. There is a scholarly debate about James’ teaching. Did he quote Q or Matthew or Luke? Scholarly debates and conferences are held to fight this out. It’s fine to fight that battle because there is no answer so we can still fight about it and footnote each other and never resolve anything. But James echoes Jesus everywhere in almost every paragraph you can hear Jesus but there is one amazing feature: he only quotes Jesus once but he sounds like Jesus all the time. He quotes Jesus in the weirdest text.
James chapter 5: “above all don’t swear…”
That quote comes out of nowhere, quoting Jesus in Matthew 5. This continues the theme of speech ethics but it is so surprising to finish on that note.
There may be another quote too I should mention…maybe he’s quoting Jesus in James 2:8 “love your neighbor as yourselves.” The fact is that no one quotes Leviticus 19:18 from Moses until the time Jesus brought that text to the surface and gave two great commands, adding Leviticus 19:18, to the more famous one everyone knew. Jesus resurrects this text and it becomes a constituent ethic for the followers of Jesus. Maybe he’s quoting Jesus there but other than that he just sounds like Jesus.
Richard Bauckham observes that the wisdom tradition is to listen to the wisdom of the sage and then re-actualize it in another environment, use the words of wisdom of the sage in a new environment. That is what James does with his older brother, the sage Jesus, in everything he says and does.

What a compliment. James you sound like Jesus all the time.

Wisdom is to listen to the wisdom of Jesus, of scripture, and to absorb it so deeply that it comes second nature to the way we talk and think. This is what James does.

I wanted to be like Murray Harris as a young teacher and I made this commitment that any time I had questions I would pass it through Murray’s desk. I always did what he told me and it was always right. Except for twice when I didn’t do what he said.

Wouldn’t you like a young pastor to come to you and say, ‘I want to know your wisdom and I’ll do what you say.’

You cannot be wise if you are not reverentially receptive to wisdom. That means you need to find the wise people, the sage and talk to them and listen and do what they say. Youth cultures will never become wisdom cultures because they do not value the sage. For James the wise pastor embodies wisdom, he is not simply the person who knows the truth and orthodoxy but who embodies wisdom by deeds done in humility. He is virtuous. If you harbor bitter envy or ambition, language for the hotheads, do not boast about it or deny it. This is worldly and demonic living. Where these things are there is chaos and disorder.

The wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure, and then peace loving. For James the wise pastor is virtuous. For James the wise pastor creates a community of peace.

“But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. 15 This is not the wisdom that comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. 16 For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice. 17 But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. 18 And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.”

I love his last expression: peacemakers who sow in peace receive a harvest of righteousness. That is the word he used negatively for hotheads…no righteousness comes as the result of peace not anger.

The posture should be to create communities of wisdom that are notable for peace. What is your aim? A building? a book? Success? Or is it to embody the wisdom of Jesus in your world?

This only comes if we spend time drinking at the fount of God’s word and listening to the wise who have lived it over time. It comes from spending time in prayer to listen to God and to communion with him. Wisdom comes when we learn that it is our aim and it will produce a community of peace.

James goes on.

3.We need to learn to check our ambition. James 4:1-10…what causes fights and quarrels? Ambition.

What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? 2 You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. 3You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. 4 You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. 5 Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”? 6 But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” 7 Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8 Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. 9 Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10 Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.”

I was speaking with Marge Peterson and we were talking theology and she observed a weird theological idea in a recent book. She said, “I always ask what will this theologian get out of that idea” It’s the theologian’s version of “follow the money.”

My wife is a psychologist. She always sees deeper and hears more in the same conversations with other people than I do. James was like the psychologist who sees that at the core of church problems is ambition to rule and dominate and get their way. You desire what you do not have so you murder. That’s the way to get what you want…kill them.

We can take this to the word of Jesus to expand our sense of murder and really see that we are there. We would rather certain people go away.

But James thinks the problem is ambition. You covet, but you cannot get, so you fight. You do not have because you do not ask God and when you ask you do not ask rightly but to fulfill your selfish desires. James wants us to check our ambitions, to realize that church battles are driven by ambition. They are about friendships.

vv.4-6, “you adulterous people” from the guy who tells us to be careful with our tongues.

You adulterous people don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity with the word.

Who do you want to be with, wisdom or the world, wisdom or success, numbers, reputation, fame…someone who invites you to speak instead of to listen?

James wants us to choose friendship with God.

James is after the hotheads who use ambition to control, fight, and get their way. James wants wisdom and peace. We need always to ask the question James is pushing.

Church battles will only cease when people submit to God.

vv.4-6, come near to god, wash your hands. He wants people to repent from their desire to control so they can become people who love each other.

I can’t tell you the number of churches I speak in in which pastors say they have battles going on. I hate to think they want me to solve it. I may be on the wrong team. Churches battle embarrassingly sometimes.

James offers a scope into the battles to see that it is ambition. This cannot be solved until the leaders check their own ambitions and speak candidly and openly to people and say, ‘This is what I want but I want what God wants more and so long as I am leader here we’ll go where he says.’

This is difficult because it means we may not get what we want. But we serve a God who gave up his son who sacrificed himself on the cross.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

Why do I want this so bad?
What does God want?
Is this place ready for this yet?

We are running out of time. Let me get to the 4th point.

4. God alone is Judge. vv.11-12 when you walk away you know what he has said and he has you on the hook.

“Do not speak evil against one another, brothers. 4 The one who speaks against a brother or judges his brother, speaks evil against the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. 12 There is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?”

James is not this issuer of judgment and he takes us back to 3:1, not many should be teachers. Teachers, though are capable and required to make discernments. Jesus set off a firestorm of nonsense when he said, ‘do not judge’. All sorts of people use this command for all sorts of silly things.

Think about it. The command comes from the same guy who called the Pharisees all sorts of things. Read Matthew 23 and see for yourself. So clearly Jesus was not a postmodern, tolerant pluralist. He believed there was good and bad and discerned between them. He did not mean, “Don’t render moral judgment.”

In the very next breath Jesus, says don’t throw your pearls before swine.

This is not a moment for us to be afraid of moral judgment. Neither is James.

Instead he says, ‘those who have this capacity could be intoxicated by it and we could make ourselves the ultimate Judge.” There is a difference between discernment and final judgment. God does that.

I recently wrote in a draft of a book:

“I love Dietrich Bonheoffer, I hate Adolf Hitler.”

I made it clear that Hitler should be in hell for a time. My editor said, “You are not the judge.” I said, “Quote the bible, will you?”
So I removed the paragraph. It’s not mine to determine Hitler’s final destiny…but if I get a vote…

This is the intoxication of rendering discernment over time, we can become judges. When we say someone’s sins are forgiven, people believe us.

This is scary.

We could usurp the place of God and become judges thinking that we are with God on the right team. We are called to be discerning and not judges.

Which leads us back to the idea that words really matter. Sometimes judgment words are not ours to render. 

There are not many techniques here but I suspect those marked by wisdom will be good pastors and planters and create communities of wisdom and peace. I would love for you to talk about the themes of James 3 and 4 and their significance in planting and pastoring.

26 years ago my wife and I moved to Plano to start a congregation. There were 13 of us in 1985. We met for 5 weeks in a row.

I put an add in the newspaper saying a new church was starting. I made phone calls, I made house-calls to over 300 to 400 people telling people about this new church.

We started in someone’s home for Eucharist with a kind of a Young Life format, singing, small groups. We did this for 12 weeks then we moved out to a middle-school for 3 years then to this property.

There was nothing out here. The building where you are sitting is the first building we built. Then we gradually built the others—back to back building programs for the last 25 years.

It has been an incredible run. And I am thankful to open it for you.

When we think about the call for our life we must know how we are going to respond. We have all had a call.

Some of you had a call to give yourself to building congregations for the Lord in the Episcopal Church and you did that for a number of years and then things began to turn sour and you had to get out. And so did I

Some of you are new and have never seen The Episcopal Church and this is all you know, you are part of the new generation that does not remember those days and thinks mainly about what lies ahead.

You are here because your heart beats when someone talks about church planting. You are here because you have a call.

You resonate with Jesus’ Galilean ministry, when walking beside the Sea of Galilee he sees men throwing nets out and then waiting and then scooping them in to see if they have any fish.

That exercise of casting, waiting drawing in the fish and then mending the nets, Jesus saw that and said, “I can use that skill.” “I will make you fishers of men.” 

You feel in your heart that out are called to fish.

You have a pastor’s heart but you also know that there is this massive lake of opportunity out there and Jesus has called you “Come with me and I’ll make you fishers of men.”

[A photo of a lone fisherman with a fishing pole is projected onto the screen behind David Roseberry]

Many websites that list that verse have pictures of lonely fishermen with a single rod and reel casting a hook with one bit of bait on it. That is very American. We have taken our idea of fishing and superimposed that on the real gospel story.

That is not what Jesus had in mind. We know the fishing in his day was more than single line fishing. It was more than one cast after another, more than putting one bait within striking distance of the right fish

You all know that’s the wrong idea.

We have been individuals designing individual ministries, going out by ourselves. Saying I am going to bring one person into the kingdom at a time. Nothing wrong with that, but that is not the skill Jesus is thinking of when he called the disciples.

He’s thinking of a net, intertwined, designed to catch lots of people or none, needing sometimes to be mended, effective to be cast out into deep water where fish may or may not be feeding, but more effective than a single line.

That is what we are about. We know we cannot cast one hook at a time. There must be some efforts to think about the process of bringing people into the kingdom, into an interwoven structure of community, designed to grab people out of the world and draw them into the life of the local church.

That is what this conference is about, helping every leader to conceive that the task we have is not one hook at a time but a net. Some of you have, if you are in the older year, remember the Cursillo mantra: Make a friend, be a friend, and bring a friend to Christ. That is a good motto and indeed it is the call on each individual.

But a church planter is going to starve if that’s his only methodology

Jesus saw people doing some things in Galilee that were transferrable. Peter, James, John had their businesses, they knew about being fishermen. It was lucrative; they knew they could live that way. Jesus says, “This is a transferable skill”.

I can use that out in the kingdom.

I am not being at all critical of individual relationship evangelism. Everyone in this room was caught by Christ through another person but you were brought in and discipled in all likelihood by a community

And we want to reach what that community looks like in this conference.

Let me develop this idea

Luke 5:1-11
On one occasion, while the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he was standing by the lake of Gennesaret, 2 and he saw two boats by the lake, but the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. 3 Getting into one of the boats, which was Simon’s, he asked him to put out a little from the land. And he sat down and taught the people from the boat. 4 And when he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.” 5 And Simon answered, “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets.” 6 And when they had done this, they enclosed a large number of fish, and their nets were breaking. 7 They signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both the boats, so that they began to sink. 8 But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” 9 For he and all who were with him were astonished at the catch of fish that they had taken, 10 and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. And Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.” 11 And when they had brought their boats to land, they left everything and followed him.

Jesus calls his first disciples. He sees them washing their nets which means it is the end of fishing time, probably morning. Jesus cheekily commandeers the boat. It’s Simon’s boat. He asks him to put out from the land.

Jesus knew Simon. This was not their first encounter. If you look at the evidence, this was the second time that Jesus called Simon. That is why he was familiar with the boat. In Mark he called him the first time. He dropped his nets and left to follow Jesus…only to give up and return to fishing. And in Luke 5 here he is fishing again.

And after Jesus finishes teaching, he has Peter put out and then he tells him let down your nets. This is after a full night of fishing in which Peter has been unsuccessful.

And Peter says: because you say so I’ll do it.

Peter is not saying yes Rabbi, yes Teacher. He’s saying, yes Lord, he’s saying, “Master and Commander”, if you say so, I’ll do it. You were captain of my life the first time you called me but I went my own way. But now I want you to know you are truly my captain. At your word I will do what you say and let my nets down.

Jesus begins to direct what happens next.

They pull in large catch.

This is an example of obedience. When you obey Christ and cast the nets again even if you’ve been doing it for years unsuccessfully, he will bring in a catch.

And you know there’s been a catch when there is chaos on the boat. That is the sign of a successful church plant. The chaos. They come in chaos.

Sometimes you have people show up and you have no idea where they came from or how long they’ll stay and you realize that the net cast has included them or that the Lord has seen fit to put them in the proximity to where we cast.

Church planting is not single line fishing. Do that, that is our individual call, but I want you know that the call as a disciple is this teamwork that is done with nets. Hard work, slow work, cold work, repeating work, patient work.

Think about working on a fishing boat, casting the net, off it goes and you wonder and wait. If you’ve ever done that, you know what that feels like as a church planter every Sunday when you wonder how many will come back.

You are at your school, or bar, or storefront or Lutheran church that opened its doors at 4pm to let you hold your services and you’re waiting and the parking lot is empty except for your car and then one family comes and you know what they’re thinking when they pull up, they’re thinking “Really? It’s just us?”

You call your wife and tell her to park her car in the parking lot.

It’s hard work. It is hard and fun.

If you are cut out for church planting it is the best work in the church—the most fun and terrifying, rewarding, difficult, but fun work in the church…that is, if you have the gifts.

If you are having fun through all of this you are called to plant churches.

If not you are in a constant state of anxiety, wondering, fearfully, anxiously if they will come and then when they leave you worry about having offended them—so much so that it is torturous and not fun at all, then you are probably not called to plant churches.

So we do this work and it is all under that banner of Anglican 1000. It is a ministry of the ACNA and I am thankful that Archbishop Duncan was at Christ Church, was in that room right next door when he called for 1000 churches in 5 years. He said, “Nara tells me I have to retire in 5 years.” And Nara was nodding. “So,” he said, “I call for 1000 churches in five years, some can do a lot, some not much but we can all do something.”  There was a rush of applause. I haven’t felt that kind of rush “A Place to Stand” when Ratzinger sent his message to us.

The 700 clergy and the 800 delegates who were here saw it all and it effectively what happened is that this changed the subject from death to life.

I say this recognizing that some people had so much more to do to get out of the predicament they were in than others. They couldn’t just decide immediately to plant churches.

We have heroes today who are not here because they are having parish meetings in Virginian to deal with a massive move their congregations are being forced to make.

There are other problems too. I’ll talk more about ACNA and AMiA in a moment.

But everyone was and is talking about church planting and it began that night.

I wish he had called for 100 churches because then the bigger churches in the ACNA could just cast out a single line and that would be it.

But he said 1000 which means that big churches could not just individually plant one church. We are all going to have to be churches that plant churches that themselves plant other churches.

I thought of ways to describe that moment and all the ways to describe the last few years of leading Anglican 1000 and I found this youtube clip

Alright Archbishop, off with the shirt.

He had the courage to stand up at his installation to call for something that was crazy and align himself with a vision that would transform Anglicanism in North America expanding it it and blessing us along the way and creating in us a net that works and network that the Lord can use to throw out into a broken world and take those we catch through what it means to follow Christ.

So we began a website and began counting plants.

We had to have a definition of what a church is. There are many ways to do this but we came down to one simple requirement: If you have a website you’re a church. That means a contact, a home address, an email address, a location…that tells us, this is at least a real group

[map of Canada with yellow dots on the southern section]

Each of these yellow dots you see, we’re looking first in Canada, are in the southern part where it is warm. You see that we have maybe 30 new churches.

Canada was well ahead of us when we started. You’ll get the numbers later.

This has been amazing time in the US as well.

[map of the US is projected onto the screen with a number of yellow dots signifying church plants]

Each of these yellow dots is a new church that has been planted since the call to form 1000 churches. You will see some states where there are no Anglican church plants. One day there will be dots there but not yet.

We have placed a web magnifying tool over the Dallas/Ft.Worth area and there you see a dozen churches

In DC the same thing, about a dozen congregations.

We don’t have the manpower or the wiring to check to see what kind of shape these churches are in. I can’t vouch for all of them. They may close. We don’t run from failure. We want to know about it and we want to know what went wrong, so it’s important to be honest and transparent about it when it happens.

We have had some speed bumps and potholes.

We need to be honest about that. When we put our foot to the gas—when we want to work together and cast out a net, when we want to do these things, we need to know there are loose ends, we need to see that there is breakage in the net.

I can think of a couple that we all know about.

The status of the AMiA is a speedbump we need to stop and take note.

How are we going to stay united and biblical and missionary –how are we going to do that when we have brothers and sisters not in fellowship?

And yet these issues are being addressed. There are patch crews working on this road.

And there are other bumps, like the situation in Seabury Church in Connecticut facing litigation that diocese. Churches in these situations do not have the resources or the time to plant churches. That’s okay, that’s a speed bump. We need to slow down rather than just press on blindly.

The thing is about Anglican church planting…we have a policy that demands every planter be connected to someone

Other denominations can just have a guy who graduates from seminary, picks a spot and plants a church.

You can’t do that in Anglicanism.

You can’t be a lone ranger in the Anglican church. You have to have a bishop or a rector holding you accountable. We don’t have it in our system to have individual private practice out there. We are part of a network.

So we want our plants and our networks to be interconnected and there are, as a result, going to be problems that other denominations do not have.

But you can see that the road is open and this is why we press on.

With regard to the AMiA problem, there are people way above our pay grade working on this to patch it together. I hope all have a heart to welcome this.

The reason we do that is that we have a lot of work to do. This is a big continent. Murphy would often say there are 150 million unchurched people in the US. There are far more when Canada is added. And all we’ve done so far is plant 211 churches.

So we have a long way to go.

But it is my intention to do it together. If we need patience and to hold our opinions and judgments while things work out then we do that for the cause

Introducing Anglican100:

I don’t work alone. I consider it a tactic to employ bring the right people in to help get things done. I always look better that way.

The guys I am introducing you too are part of the Anglican 1000 team.

Daniel Adkinson

Julian Dobbs

Ray David Glenn (Canada contact)

Katie Boone

Conference Stats:

393 registrants (largest of any year)
35 US states and Canadian provinces represented.
76 churches represented here have planted since January of 09 have
65 churches represented here planted before 09
25 spouses of planters are here

100 more represent churches that will plant before 20 (14
66 trainers are present
38 seminary students
18 seminaries are represented

Adding these together there are potentially an additional 276 (?) churches soon to be planted in the room if you add up all the numbers.

This is an amazing response and there are so many others.

This is all part of an overarching talk so don’t think have lost myself or my place

Anglican1000 is moving. Part of that is because of our success. It is currently based down here at Christ Church. Daniel Adkinson is the officer but all the decisions and actions really come out of the office of the rector.

This movement has so much potential for the province that this needs to be owned by the province. I came to this on my own through a conversation with the staff and ++Duncan and through some challenges that emerged in the last few months. The very best thing is for this movement is for it to find its permanent home within the ACNA structures with regional bases like Christ Church throughout the nation.

I thought about this last night. There could not be a better time to recast this vision than now because of the provincial assembly in June and the AMiA situation.

All of this lets us go to phase 2 of the expansion and that will mean that lots of you will be called to serve and many ways. Many of you will be called to focus on Anglian1000.

I am going to tell you about a new office that will need to be created…the vicar of Anglican 1000. This is a staff position on the Archbishop’s staff, someone who reports directly to the Archbishop.

The person who will fill that position is in this room.  I don’t know who that is.

Or, maybe they couldn’t come but wanted too [laughter].

The person who has the heart, vitality, and vision to fill this position is probably in this room. If you feel that is you, make an appointment to see the Archbishop. There is no recruiting of my staff, but he can recruit from yours [laughter].

If you are thinking I can do this, what an amazing opportunity, then go see him.

Now a couple of other things:

1. I want you know, this is hard work…very difficult. They say that it is easier to make babies than to raise the dead. It is also true to say that it is easier to make babies than to raise children.

Starting your first service is easy.  Getting the church to grow, that is the hard part. Getting a church going, worshipping, discipling, evangelizing, doing these things in an Anglican way, that is difficult.

This graphic is one of the most over used ones on the web.

[picture of hands scooping up a tiny green plant growing in fertile soul]

It is so misleading. The implication is either that God hands you a growing entity that is nice and healthy.

Or that the hands are your hands and all you have to do is reach down and pick up a plant and it becomes green and thriving.

Neither is true.

Planting a church involves many jobs

[graphic including many different tasks: worship leader, preacher, theologian, soccer coach, tweeter, budget director, tenant, manager, community organizer, janitor, sound tech, scholar, plumber, IT specialist, and faithful servant of the most high God]

It is rocket science

And what we have to do as rocket scientists is put all this together because we stand as a network united together under Christ building congregations.

How our churches stand together and function together is the subject of this conference.

Pause for prayer.

My purpose is not only to introduce Anglican 1000 but also to briefly give you the structure of what we are trying to do, what kind of net are we are trying to fashion not just church to church but also within a given congregation

Congregations ought to be simple to get. I’ve worked with enough vestries to know that every vestry or plant team wants a series of controls running from the rector’s fingertips to the congregation. They want a wire from the finger of the planter to people in the congregation so that when he says everyone come for a barbeque on Sunday evening, everyone comes to the barbeque on Sunday evening.

And they want another string that is connected to other people in the congregation so that when the planter says this person is in the hospital someone knows to bake a plate of brownies for the family…and, like clockwork, a plate of brownies arrive on the doorstep of the family in question.

We want our churches to run like a puppet on the rector’s string. It’s along these lines that you have the desire to create this beautiful but lifeless figure that will do all you want it to do and become the tool or machine that you want it to be. To have this puppet who receives the message and then goes out and shares it with the right people who, then, rightly come into the church.

But it’s never like this. Boards, vestries, bishops want things to be like this but they never are. Just call people, they say, and tell them to do it as if it is this mechanical process over which the rector has total control.

But we know it doesn’t work that way.

It is true you have to develop a number of connections between your heart and the leaders in your church. You do have to be able to give directions and have them heeded. This should happen. You should be able to move a couple of things efficiently through a couple of calls. The meetings should happen. You should be able to tell the greeters to greet the visitors but not smother them. You should be able to make that happen.

It is really up to you as rector or planter to decide how this should operate overall.

But you know Pinocchio became a real boy when a fairy changed his nature from something that was stiff and wooden to something that was alive

And when he was made a real living boy he had a sin filled heart and mind, but it was a real one.

What we want to create is a community of people that functions like the body of Christ like, Pinocchio functioned, like a real living boy…not a mechanism but a life, with an energy of its own

That is what we see in Acts in the first half dozen chapters. We see the body develop the muscle and bone of mission. You would think that the attempts of the apostles to create structure would take hold, but it doesn’t.

In fact the first church functions like a real boy because the Holy Spirit breathed life into it. It’s not easy to control.

[Three tiered pyramid graphic with the following functions of the church identified in descending order]

Worship
External Focus/Discipleship
Communication/Administration/Pastoral Care

They had their hearts set to and tuned on a triune God and this all came together in worship.

They had heart for the less fortunate. In Acts 6 they are helping care for the widows. Earlier Peter and John are going to pray and notice a beggar and heal him.

We all know Acts 2:42 and how they continued in the apostles’ teaching

And we know there was training Acts 8.

Everywhere we see this working together and this communication of the gospel to other people and raising up leaders in the early church.

We see extraordinary communication in the early church

That we have letters from Paul at all is a miracle…that the thick, theologically rich, beautiful letters were written at all is a miracle.

God laid it on Paul’s heart to write to the Corinthians 4 times or so the scholars say.

There were administrative practices in the early church…dividing labor between deacons and apostles. And then we see the collection of money that the saints trusted Paul and Barnabas with to carry to Jerusalem, because Christians there were victims of the famine.

Then you have pastoral practices. You hear this with Paul who is always addressing some issue in the churches.

If we’re looking at Acts to model our churches after, let’s not focus on just one verse…there is a wider way of looking at the church that takes in the whole book and is far more holistic than Acts 2.42. And when you look at Acts in this broad way you find the church engaging in the following 6 practices.

Worship
External Focus
Discipleship
Communication
Administration
Pastoral Care

We are going to look at all these six practices and how these look in an Anglican context,

Honestly, I can say a lot of new churches trip over this. They are so excited to get to worship that they fail to set themselves upon solid administrative practices, pastoral practices, communication habits.

We refer to the above six practices with the acronym: WEDCAP

This is everything I know about church planting and group leadership and management on one page.

David Taylor will come in and tell us about worship in the Anglican tradition

Mike Breen will talk about External focus and Discipleship

Then we have workshops dedicated to administration, communication, and pastoral care.

But I want you to take a look at this and examine it.

I think this is distinctly Anglican because it says that worship is our highest function…the leading edge of our congregations or plants. Without worship we may as well pack it in.

We are not just a community of volunteers who study the bible in small groups…we worship as a body.

Out of worship flows two critical functions…External Focus and Discipleship…a healthy church will produce these in equal measure.  Evangelism and the Study of Scripture…are the twin engines of the plane.

Then at the bottom, these are really administrative functions that are core to any functioning congregation. We are going to help you think in these areas.

The pulpit leads the church. Every worship service is led by the pulpit. Some argue it is the sacrament. If that is you, I am glad to hold that position with you in the same Anglican organization but I want to say the pulpit leads the church. I suppose we can say both together since we are Anglican. But the strength of the church, the main thing that has to happen on Sunday morning is preaching and preaching is the heart of worship. To worship rotely or routinely is to dull, to blunt the instrument, the knife edge of your church as it grows

People join the church because of what is on the top of the pyramid not because of what is on the bottom

They do not come because of your newsletter or administration skills or because of your vestry or organizational leadership…the bottom of the pyramid will not attract people.

From the top strength will flow. When things are “on” on Sunday morning something is happening because the people have come together to worship and they are out there in the field during the week and there is outreach and discipleship and that is all a church has to have to grow and reach the community.

If it is weak worship it will be weak in the pews.

If there is a mist in the pulpit, there will be a fog in the pews.

If there is a crisis of faith in the pulpit will be transmitted to the pews.

I say, “Lead the top, staff the bottom.”

A focus on the bottom of the pyramid will not make a growing church

That is not to take away the importance of the bottom

Church planting begins at the bottom. The single most common reason that churches stall is that they start at the top. The opposite is true. Start the church with the bottom

There are exceptions and they have to do with age and stage…church plants that won’t have a building. But if you listened to Steve Wood talk about St. Andrew’s Mt. Pleasant, you would know that they started at the bottom, communicating to people at St. Andrew’s and they held meetings and they got a staff together and a website and a branding mechanism and then they began to do pastoral work, you heard him…no one gets into our church without being in a life group and serving and giving. They built it from the ground up.

Those who believe if you just start worshiping they will come…Let me help you…don’t do it that way.

Start with administration, understand your vision, what makes a member, how are you going to get money, where are you going to put it? Do you have a treasurer, a bank account?

I learned this the hard way. We started meeting at Christ Church on Sunday evenings in someone’s home…someone gave me a check for 25 dollars. I didn’t know what to do with it. No one had given anything before. I didn’t have a treasurer. I asked the person who gave to be the treasurer. He didn’t have a bank account

We had to retrench and start with administration.

Start at the bottom, build to the top

What are we going to do and how much is it going to cost?

I will tell you that if you screen this back and look at what large mega churches are doing, they are cutting staff and programming and getting rid of extraneous things that have clogged the arteries of their churches and getting down to simple things. “We are going to worship, grow, serve”.

All these huge churches are getting simpler and simpler. The way you get to that simple place is start at the bottom.

Should take you about two months,…but don’t start at the top.

Everything you will hear at the conference is built around these six ideas.