Being a Go - To Church

Introduction

Do you have a dream of vibrancy for your local church? Do you desire to be fruitful for Christ's kingdom? Do you desire to reach the unchurched and unreached in your community? Do you feel at a loss for new ideas to attract people to your church? If so, then become a Go-To Church. Become a church that decides to go-to rather than wait for the world to come-to; ask a different set of questions; live by a different set of rules; change the way you think and live and serve and you can see your desires and God's dreams realized.

In the summer of 1998, God sent my wife, Wendy, and me to Tupelo, Mississippi, to begin a new United Methodist faith community. Tupelo was a fast-growing furniture town near the community where I grew up. The prospect of starting a new church was both daunting and exciting, and we moved to town with passion, vision, and a dream.

During the year prior to our arrival in Tupelo, we had been part of a Doctor of Ministry residential program that focused on Biblical Preaching and Leadership. We had accepted that residential fellowship with a specific group of people in mind—those who did not go to church for any reason. My wife and I both grew up in church; in church vernacular, we were both "lifers." But we both knew many people in the Tupelo region who had been burned by church, did not understand church, did not like church, or could not see faith's relevance to their everyday lives. With these people in mind, we moved to Tupelo and went to work.

When we began to consider a strategy for reaching that group of people and being the kind of church they would consider attending, it became obvious that there was a group of people who had faced the same challenge, had the same heart, and had been largely successful at it—the first disciples. The fact that every person in all of history, past, present, or future, who had ever believed in the resurrection and trusted Jesus with their lives could trace the beginning of hearing the good news back to one of those original twelve was a strong testimony that they had a great plan and tremendous resources to get the job done. With that in mind, we began to search the Scriptures closely for insights that might inform and empower the work God had given us to do in the Tupelo region.

When the early church began, there were a few more people involved than just the original twelve. However, it is clear from Scripture that Jesus firmly placed the responsibility of interesting the disinterested on them. We too felt that same responsibility, and with that responsibility came an overwhelming feeling that we were in over our heads. But Scripture also comforted us as we recognized that God's story is full of accounts of God giving human beings monumental tasks. However, it is also God's practice to give the resources and the direction necessary to get the job done.

God told Abraham that he would be the father of a multitude when Abraham had no children. When Abraham believed, God gave Abraham a son and descendants as numerous as the stars. God told Noah to build an ark to save his family and two of every species on the earth at the time because an enormous flood would come to destroy every living thing. Noah, with God's blueprint, built the ark, and God brought the animals to Noah so he could put them on the boat. David faced Goliath, Elijah challenged the four hundred prophets of Baal, and Moses faced down Egypt's greatest Pharaoh—and these are just a few of the stories of God giving human beings monumental tasks and the resources to do them.

We should not be surprised that Jesus gave the disciples the monumental task of reaching the world. Jesus was not giving the disciples some motivational take-the-world-by-storm kind of speech. It was Jesus' intention that those disciples would perpetuate the task he had begun in such a way that it might one day come to completion.

Wendy and I wanted to be faithful in that work and to be part of a community of faith that wanted to be faithful in that work, and so we began to plan, dream, and cast vision for a community of faith called The Orchard, which would be an orchard not only in name but also in practice.

The Orchard and an Orchard

This name and this dream were birthed as we became entrenched in John 15.

John 15 is divided into two large sections around a pivotal verse, John 15:16. Jesus announces, "You didn't choose me. I chose you. I appointed you to go and produce lasting fruit, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask for, using my name." Jesus uses multiple images for what he wants disciples to be doing, but here he clearly points out that he expects us to "bear fruit."

In teaching and leading, we wanted to be clear not only about what Jesus wanted us to do but also how he wanted us to do it. There are, depending on which version you read, approximately forty-three mentions of the word fruit in the New Testament. If you begin to group those forty-three occurrences, then you find that they begin to arrange themselves into three distinct groups. I titled these groups and identified a representative Scripture reference for each group as a way of trying to understand what Jesus meant by "fruit" so we can determine just how we are to produce it.

The first fruit group might be called Presentation. Jesus says, "Yes, just as you can identify a tree by its fruit, so you can identify people by their actions" (Matthew 7:20). Jesus is indicating that you can tell where someone is rooted by the kind of fruit on the end of the branch. If he or she is rooted in Christ, then that person will produce a very different kind of fruit than if he or she is rooted in the self or in anything other than Christ.

The second fruit group might be called Progress. In John 17:17 Jesus prays that God the Father would make his disciples holy by setting them apart in truth. This holy-making that Jesus prays for is a little more clearly understood when we read a passage from Paul's letter to the Galatians. Paul writes, "But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control" (Galatians 5:22-23). The Holy Spirit is at work progressively making us more fully into the likeness of Christ. The Spirit is producing fruit in our lives.

The third representative group is called People. Jesus clearly says, "the fruit [that the harvesters] harvest is people brought to eternal life" (John 4:36).

Jesus calls the disciples to fruit-bearing, and a careful examination of the New Testament points to this fruit as helping people become more rooted in Christ so they can grow up to be like Christ and can introduce people to Christ. This is what Jesus means by fruit-bearing.

How?

After some clarification of what we were supposed to be doing, we turned to the question of how we go about this work. In the first section of John 15 (verses 1-15) Jesus reminds the disciples that he is the Vine and they are the branches and apart from him they can do nothing. It is clear that he does not mean some things—he means no-thing. Withered and fruitless because of disconnection, the branches will be gathered and discarded in the fire. So the first message to the disciples is a reminder to maintain an ongoing vibrant connection to the Source of wisdom, strength, clarity, and power that will make their fruit-bearing mission possible. Because we were trying to connect disconnected people, we wanted to make this image as clear as possible, so we called this staying connected emphasis "growing deep." An orchard is a place that is devoted to the cultivation of fruit for Christ's kingdom by helping people grow deep in the love of Jesus.

The second section of John 15 (verses 18-27) lets the disciples know just how difficult their task is going to be. It seems that in this section Jesus overuses the word hate, but Jesus knows the reception that the disciples are going to get will mirror the one that he receives. Yet, he wants them to know that he will send "the Advocate—the Spirit of truth" (John 15:26) and that in the power of that Spirit they are to testify about him as those who knew him best. For clarity's sake, we called this outreach emphasis "branching out." An orchard is a place that is devoted to the cultivation of fruit for Christ's kingdom by helping people grow deep in the love of Jesus and branching out to others with that love.

The clarity of that vision and mission has guided our dreams and hopes from the very first day until now. We earnestly desired to plant a community of faith so in tune with God's call and passion that it would be pliable enough to reshape itself continually in order to remain a useful instrument to accomplish God's purposes. It would have a God-centered intuitiveness about how to communicate the eternal truth of the good news to an ever-changing culture. This community of faith would not be encumbered by the politics of power, and personal opinion would not be the deciding factor in matters of governance. This community of faith would clearly speak the message of faith in the language of the people, and it would hold every tradition, practice, and movement lightly while holding to the unchanging gospel firmly. This would be a community of faith who had a clear understanding of what God was calling them to do and how God was calling them uniquely to do it. Moreover, this would be a people whose structure was streamlined enough to actually be this kind of community and not merely talk or dream about it.

The Orchard set its sights on becoming an orchard. This fruitfulness through growing deep and branching out has been our aim as we have pursued this vision for the last thirteen years. With the twenty-thousand unreached people in our region on our hearts and minds, we have had to be an adaptable organism that responds to the needs of the people we are trying to reach without abandoning who God has called us to be as God's representatives in this community. This need for adaptability not only opened our eyes to our need to be constantly changing in order to meet people where they are, but it also opened our eyes to new communities and new ideas of how this adaptable spirit could help us reach them. This continual challenge to change in order to be effective poses great risks and presents great opportunities.

Because we are constantly changing, people who fell in love with a particular practice of ministry at The Orchard risk falling out of love with us when we no longer practice that ministry or method that they loved. But the greater risk is to take no risk at all—determining what we do and doing it for decades even though it no longer effectively produces what we were called to produce: disciples. It is the opportunity to try new things to reach new people that must drive the church who would be fruitful for Christ's kingdom.

Our dream is that we would be an orchard, not just a church called The Orchard. An orchard produces fruit. It doesn't fall in love with the idea of being an orchard. It exists to bear fruit. Planting, pruning, and uprooting are all parts of being fruitful—of realizing a vision to reach the unreached in our region, to help them grow to be like Jesus, and to send them out to act like Jesus in order that they may introduce people to Jesus.

Countercultural?

Taking risks for the advancement of the gospel should not be countercultural in the Church, but it seems too often that it is. The mainline church has been in decline for four decades while churches that are nimble enough to respond to cultural changes and focused enough to remember why they exist thrive.

Large organizations like my denomination (The United Methodist Church) have neither the capacity nor the desire to change. By sheer size, they have garnered a following and resources that let them sustain their existence long after their effectiveness has gone. With layers of approval and resources spread so thinly over hundreds if not thousands of emphases, these denominations make decisions and implement policy that are aimed at survival, not effective accomplishment of Christ's mission.

These denominations can serve as a macrocosm of local churches that are no better off. Because they exist without the end "product" clearly in mind, there is no way to honestly examine whether or not they are effective. With no clear scorecard, many mainline churches (just like their mainline denominational parent) do what they have always done even though effectiveness is long gone. They operate programs and ministries with the aim of bringing people in their doors who will bring resources that will further sustain them.

Research from an ARIS (American Religious Identification Survey) study conducted at the opening of the decade showed a significant shift away from organized religion with an increasing number of Americans defining themselves as "spiritual but not religious." That same study showed that more Americans define themselves as "spiritual but not religious" than the number who are Lutheran, Methodist, or Episcopalian taken as a whole (NowPublic.com: "Statistics Show 33% of Americans Spiritual but Not Religious," www.nowpublic.com/culture/statisticsshow-33-americans-spiritual-not-religious#ixzzltXUqb297).

The findings suggest that the organization that is flexible enough to meet people where they are in their "spiritual but not religious" state and enter into faith conversations with them will be much more effective than organizations that keep doing what they have been doing, hoping that outsiders show up.

The Go-To Church

What this ultimately means is that the church general and the church local must stop acting as if we are the center of culture in America. We enjoyed that designation for the first two hundred years of our life in America but no more. We can no longer fling open the doors and expect the crowds to rush in; we are no longer a "come here" organization as is evidenced by the large number of people who will not or no longer "come here."

But what is the alternative? The Go-To Church. The answer to fulfilling our call to reach the world is to go to the world. Jesus didn't instruct the disciples to stay in Jerusalem and wait for the world to come to them; he instructed them to go to the world. Though our going will look different than that of those first disciples, the command still stands. The task then becomes to identify what a Go-To Church looks like.

The Go-To Church lives by a different set of questions and rules. The Go-To Church doesn't ask, "What can we do to get people to come here?" Instead they ask, "What needs do people out there have that we need to meet?" The Go-To Church doesn't ask, "What about our members?" The Go-To Church asks, "What about the people who live outside our doors and in our community?" The Go-To Church doesn't ask, "What will make our church grow?" It asks, "What are Jesus' priorities in our community and world?"

The Go-To Church also lives by the rule of relationship. Everything is about relationship, and that means that the Go-To Church goes to the community to build relationships that meet the needs of the poor, marginalized, disinterested, and disconnected. They don't assume that those people will begin a relationship with the church, and they become the church that builds a relationship with them.

Exactly how these questions are answered and this rule is followed is as unique as each of the communities in which local churches exist. One community might answer those questions and live out this rule of relationship in a very different way than another community. For this reason, this book is not about the answers to those questions. Rather, this book is about how to customize ministry in response to the answers to those well-crafted questions in the community where you live.

The Go-To Church is not a program that you buy nor is it a designation you earn by completing a checklist of practices or acquired resources. The Go-To Church is a strategic way of thinking about the heart of the gospel, the heart of your local church, and the unreached and disconnected people who live in the communities around your church. The Go-To Church is a way of customizing the mission and ministry of your church to connect to the specific culture and nuances of the people you would reach. This book will show you how.

Why Multisite?

Waking Up

The realization hit me as I was standing in the middle of nearly 3,000 people at our largest "come-level" event of the year—"as large as this group is, it is only a fraction of the unreached population in our region." The Orchard—the church my wife and I founded and lead—has always worked extremely hard to connect to people who do not have a personal relationship with Jesus or a connection to a community of faith. This event was no exception. By design our free Fall Festival in the park doesn't smell, look, or feel like church. No one prays, makes any service-time announcements, or introduces any of our pastors. We play secular music, with free food, games, and fun for everyone because we want our community to know that we are normal people who are motivated by Jesus' love for us to love and serve them.

As I stood there, in what could be evaluated as a largely successful event with over 1,000 guests, I wondered what it would take to reach the other 20,000 people in our town, and the 5,000 unreached in the next town, and the unreached 3,000 in the next. Have you ever wondered that? Interestingly enough, I had some of the answers to my questions in my own congregation. We already had a number of people driving from these outlying communities; all I needed to do was ask them, "How do we reach your friends?" Our interest in and development of a Multisite strategy came in response to their answers.