Can churches deny human choice?

A lot of the critical and necessary debate on this blog comes around one way or the other to: How does the church handle the rising tide of consumerism in its expression?

It’s not an accident: The web has empowered the individual like no other time in history, and the act of accomplishing ministry in this context is bound to flirt, sometimes dangerously, with abetting the self-seeking, vain, prideful human heart without God, rather than calling it to repentence in light of the manifest glories of God.

It seems to me that man has always seen himself at the center of all things. This is not new. What is new is the extent to which man can now do it in almost all phases of life. And the remedy for this heart sickness is and always will be the cross of Jesus.

So here’s my question: When God calls you to salvation, do you really have a choice to “opt out” of the body of Christ? Is it not one of the most magnificent promises of scripture that it’s not possible?

Only “Christians” with unregenerate hearts go shopping for God “experiences,” rather than surrender to him.

Only “Christians” with no understanding of Lordship believe that God is a vending machine of blessings.

Only “Christians” who have never heard the truth will allow themselves to be swayed by every wind of doctrine.

Is it not the gospel, the good news, the freedom from captivity, that human agency, human choice, for the regenerated heart, is always for good?

Our hyper-consumerist society is still relatively young, probably 100 years old at best. And for the church, for thousands of years a local phenomenon, our history with it is even shorter. Perhaps 50, if that. And i think that, if anything, there is a reckoning coming for the church as it wrestles with this, which probably explains some of my passion for the Web Church: It accelerates the urgency of figuring this out.

I submit that the battle is not between consumerism and whatever some Christians think can control it — authority structures, whatever. The battle is to get anointed, gospel-saturated teaching that places the supremacy of Christ above all things into earshot of as many dead hearts as possible so they can be convicted and awakened to life in Christ.

We need to make sure that people choose the church rather than Oprah, Dr. Phil, Tom Cruise and every other self-help guru who is leading people dancing and singing straight to the gates of hell.

Only then will they know difference between a true and false gospel.

Only then will they know the difference between a life that glorifies self and a life that serves God

Only then will they know that Jesus’ call to total surrender can not be resisted except with tears.

And only then will the Holy Spirit magnificently insist that the appetite for seeing, savoring and treasuring the joy of Christ be fed insatiably.

I ask again: Where does the path lead for Christ-centered churches who work in this “crooked and twisted generation” without an understanding of choice?

Filed under: discipleship, evangelism, ruminations, web campus , culture, discipleship, evangelism, theology, web campus

Web church as “safe space” to explore Christian faith

This is my last post exploring the fascintating conclusions from Hartford Seminary’s groundbreaking study on megachurch attenders and what the web church can learn from it. You can read posts one, two and three and four if you missed them.

One of the more fascinating parts of the study showed that:

some people intentionally don’t want to establish friendships, even if they are highly committed to the church. Certain people come because they can be, and want to remain, anonymous. … almost a third of those at these churches over five years still report having very few close friends there. For some attenders even long-term participation in the megachurch is about something other than having a network of close friendships.

Let’s face it: “community” can be intimidating to some people, especially those who may only be just starting to live the Christian life.

That’s where the Web church’s perceived weakness — its so-called anonymity — might prove to be one of its greatest assets.

To begin with, it might provide a private, anonymous, low-commitment way to experience Christians and Christian teaching. But there’s also a clear path toward Christian community for those who want to explore it in a controlled environment, calibrated along a continuum of casual conversation, friending, commenting, messaging and physical meetups, to name just a few.

From a theological standpoint and a practical standpoint, discipleship occurs best in a community context, and the Web Church could provide that safe, community space in a believers’ formative years.

Thoughts?

Filed under: community, discipleship, web campus , community, evangelism, social media

Web church success may be tied to customization

I’ve been looking at the Hartford Seminaryanalysis of megachurch attenders because I think it could be useful in understanding the Web Church’s potential mission field and how it can extend what we’ve learned from modern church methods. You can read past posts in this series here, here and here.

One of the study’s most dramatic conclusions was that:

involvement at these (and perhaps all) churches may be less about creating an idealized plan to move someone toward commitment and more about providing many ways by which people could craft their unique, customized spiritual experience to meet their needs.

It’s logical that the Web Church respond to this apparent desire for customizing church experience. Web culture, after all, is about empowering individual choice, and letting you set the terms of your engagement with content and people.

Many NewSpring Web Campus attenders are already actively engaged in designing their own path to spiritual growth and assembling the building blocks of an online church life, spurred on by the breathtaking amount and quality of podcasts, books, and blogs that fan the flames of someone’s spiritual fires on demand.

There’s no reason to think that wouldn’t extend to all aspects of church life as they migrate online. Someone could choose one church’s online worship experiences, another’s online small groups, yet another’s online discipleship program etc. and another’s online outreach and missions program.

I think the megachurch lesson here is that offering many paths for spiritual exploration and engagement and involvement could be the Web Church’s supreme value proposition.

That could include providing social guides or personal recommendations toward other trusted, high-quality content. Or it could be offering opportunities for spiritual growth in partnership with regional, national and international ministries. It could even be providing the support systems, resources and “open access” to the Web church’s people to build new ministries and recruit for them across the web.

A believer’s attachment, then, to a Web church might not be traditional “membership,” but in the personal relationships with individual believers as they come across them in different ministry area.

What do you think?

Filed under: community, discipleship, evangelism, web campus , community, discipleship, evangelism, icampus, web campus

What about the one-anothers on the web?

I dropped this note on the blog of my good friend, Nathan Edwards, who I met through this blog and the NewSpring Web Campus.

“One-anothering is the essence of church as the body of Christ … I think there’s a lot of traditional physical churches that are resisting innovation on the web because they worry that the one-anothering will be harmed. My view is that they have an outsized and unrealistic understanding of how much one-anothering can or will people do in person these days, and an undersized and equally unrealistic view of the possibilities of one-anothering online.” Comment on “Why the web church sometimes does church better.”

Discuss.

Filed under: community, discipleship, web campus , community, discipleship, web campus

Is your web campus embracing your physical church attenders?

A church would be foolish not to see a Web Campus as a key to its growth at physical locations.

And a Web Campus would be foolish to ignore its church’s physical worshipers as a way to be successful.

One of the most biggest realizations we’ve made through the first few months of the Web Campus ministry is that our campus serves many different audiences.

Our Web Campus primarily targets the unchurched and the dechurched. People who have been relocated from your church who can’t find a good, Bible-believing church near them. Maybe people who are searching for God or for a church and seem to “connect” to NewSpring’s vision and theology.

Then there’s the sizable number of our attenders who are connected to our Anderson, Greenville and Florence campuses and are sick or out of town or just aren’t able to make it to church that week. It’s wise not to overlook the power of that second constituency to the Web Campus ministry.

No. 1In the mobile society that we all now live, physical attenders are bound to have many family and friends spread across the nation without access to a church like NewSpring, and who have been impressed by the ministry during visits or through casual conversations.

As we know, the power of personal ministry is greatest in relationships of deep love and intimate connection, and it’s in these family connections that a web campus or web ministry can best flourish.

Each family member or friend can have a shared experience — whether during the service in the chatroom or private IM or in conversations after the service. And the friend or family member can provide the instant and extended support and ministry needed by every believer to flourish in the Lord.

No. 2. Those physical attenders exposed to the Web Campus, have a natural opportunity to share a “preview” of the NewSpring experience with those that might be skeptical, reluctant or intimidated so that they can then be invited to a physical church location.

And to prove this isn’t just theory, here’s a story that providentially dropped into my email box Sunday:

I normally attend the Greenville Campus and serve on the care team. I was really bummed this morning because I had a terrible migraine and would not make it ! Thankfully I was able to attend today’s 11:15 service on the web. What an amazing experience! It was awesome to have a chance to interact with everyone in a chat room environment during Perry’s message.

After the service I came into contact with two people who have been wanting to attend the Greenville campus but didn’t want to go alone. I look forward to meeting both of them there this Sunday!

I also posted a link on my Face book profile at the start of the service . I received a reply from one of my contacts thanking me for the posting. She and her husband attended the Anderson campus last week and were looking forward to this Sundays service. She had fallen ill and couldn’t attend. Thanks to the web campus they were able to hear Perry’s powerful message today! I never ceases to amaze me to see how God move’s in our church. I can’t wait to see what’s next !

Got a take on this? Got a story or several of your own?

Filed under: community, discipleship, evangelism, social media, web campus , community, discipleship, evangelism, social media, web campus

Rise of social media means the church is running out of excuses

My friend, John Saddington, published a Q&A with me last Friday where i gave my view of the greatest impact technology would have on the church.

In case you missed it, here it is:

Time Bandits or Favorite Websites?

Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader. ESV Study Bible online=hours of fun. Ditto: Hulu, Last.fm.

Whatcha Working On?

Building a community of radical believers on the NewSpring Web Campus (newspring.cc/webcampus). Even though we were very pleased with the launch of the first phase of the physical campus, the harder work is head. Working with the rest of our communications team, I’m trying to experiment with the best methods to create a true Biblical community that is serving and discipling and evangelizing one another.

How do you see Web Technology impacting The Kingdom?

I’m a techno-evangelist, but a pragmatic one. Technology is only ever a tool, and as far as I can tell, technology always creates as many problems as it solves. I guess that’s what it means to live in a fallen world.

I believe strongly in social media as a tool for kingdom building, but only in so far as it removes so many of our excuses for our weak, ineffective witness, our partial, fragile sense of community and our lazy discipleship.

I am amazed at the amount of talent, vision and passion in the modern church movement. We’ve done a great work in stripping away the crust of dead traditions and unhelpful legalisms that had covered up our vision of Christ, but now that we have gotten to the core of the faith — loving Jesus, loving others — our fruit better prove it.

The thing about our hyper-mediated world is that a huge amount that used to be hidden in the heart is now revealed by our technology. Every word we blurt out; everywhere we go, every work we do potentially is going to be lifestreamed … and people will be able to draw even harsher judgments about whether we are Christians in name only.

We have the power to evangelize the world; we have the tools for every Christian to be without excuse: People can hear about God’s wonderful deeds, they can devote themselves to sound teaching, they can share in fellowship and offer themselves as living sacrifices to the body of Christ.

If they don’t or won’t, the only explanation is that they don’t have the heart of worship. Their knowledge and understanding of God is too small. And that means that our churches or the “priesthood of all believers” that we belong to just isn’t lifting up Christ enough and or consistently so that he can draw us closer to him for our sanctification.

Filed under: community, discipleship, evangelism, ruminations, social media , community, discipleship, evangelism, social media, theology

We rob God of power when our stories go untold

The Bible commands everyone everywhere to tell the story of God.

So why isn’t storytelling part of everything we do as a church, not just part of a preacher’s anecdotes?

That makes no sense when we structure our reality as humans through stories we hear.
And when we shape our identity through the stories we relate.
And when we see God’s heart and will for us communicated through the stories in his word.

Stories are everywhere in our congregations. But up until now, we’ve boxed them in as testimony, as evangelism. I think we can easily overlook how important it is for stories to be told and heard by believers within a congregation.

Everyone needs a reminder about the great and mighty God that we serve. The Bible itself is one glorious and perpetual reminder … And our experiences of affliction and Christ’s overcoming grace are meant for others to be strengthened and encouraged.

It’s inspiring to see efforts, such as IAmSecond.com, harness figures with credibility — famous and ordinary — to help non-believers recognize that our faith is real, authentic and supernatural. And it’s natural to harvest those stories when they are unstoppable in a believer transformed by grace. Just consider the people in scripture healed by Jesus who ignored the warnings of God! not to tell others about what happened to them.

But the strategy tends to compartmentalize the role storytelling can play. It becomes “something for others.” Rather than a part of our faith journey together as a church in discipleship and sanctification.

The wonders of our God? They are how he has romanced, rescued, comforted and healed us and other people among us. The “greater things” Jesus promised we would do after him? Those are the things happening among us right now if only we knew about them.

I’d love to see churches all over America get on board with telling stories from their congregations. As a former media guy, that’s been my individual burden almost from the moment I was saved at NewSpring five years ago.

Over the years, NewSpring has documented a few great stories, like this one and, boldly, incorporated the video during services. But there’s so much more we could do all of us could do.

Tony Morgan and I had a conversation this week about the beginnings of that strategy, which he touched on here

So why do we hear so little about the spectacular and not so spectacular miracles that every believer experiences, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly?

Because we don’t ask for them. We don’t make it easy to capture them. And we don’t make it really easy to show, as a church, how much we value them.

Are you asking?

How are you doing it?

What’s your story?

What do you suggest?

Filed under: community, discipleship, evangelism, social media , community, culture, discipleship, evangelism, social media

The tears in church are just as real on the web

The NewSpring Web Campus launch was thrilling. You can read the official account at the Web Campus blog, including video.

But what blew me away was not the number of people that were gathered. Or the fact that people from all over the world worshipped with us.

It was that amid all the philosophical and theological debates about the Web church and whether web community is real and whether sacraments can be rightly administered, we forget that real people need us to make this work.

They are in real pain, they have real souls, they have real lives and real eternities.

Perry brought a tough, intense sermon today. He challenged people to totally forgive. He asked thousands in the auditorium on the Anderson Campus to write names on sheets of paper and to tear them in unison as they were set free from Satan’s grip.

Everyone heard that sound. It brought Perry to tears. And it brought the Web Campus to tears. It drove many people to seek help in our live prayer. And for one reason or another, these people were not in a local church on the ground in their neighborhood.

Sure, we could try and persuade them that physical attendance is the “right thing to do.” We could even take a crack at justifying why they should attend a local church.

Even if they are not being challenged and stretched spiritually.

Even if they are not in fellowship that encourages and strengthens them and that can hold them accountable.

Would we be successful? I doubt it.

But here’s the thing: They were at church. It was just online. And they need the church to stop arguing about whether they were really there and just figure out how we can be the church online for them; how we can help each other love God, love others and make disciples.

It’s time to stop talking about bit-rates, and web design, and the latest, shiniest new tools and to start talking about how we build genuine, Christ-centered community for the long haul.

The web has changed social arrangements forever. We cannot argue about that any longer.

In post-Christian Europe, local churches everywhere are being shut down and turned into luxury condos or bars. Physical, bricks-and-mortar church holds little to no meaning other than prejudice and anachronism for hundreds of millions of people.

We would be sinning against Christ and his sacrifice on the cross to turn our backs on them.

I plan to charge the gates of hell with our Web Campus. Who’s with me?

Filed under: community, discipleship, evangelism, ruminations, social media, web campus , community, culture, discipleship, evangelism, ruminations, social action, theology, web campus, web campus rollout

The web church is the new reformation

It was one of the remarks on Twitter from my boss Tony Morgan that was deceptively easy to glance over.

“Multi-site changes everything. Campuses on the Web changes everything else.”

It resonated with me, because from the first day I felt God calling me to explore how to be the church in the digital age, I was confident that the web church will herald a new reformation.

Those are big words. Weighty words, for sure. Maybe a tad hyperbole. But I’m serious.

In the first reformation, the technology of the printing press made it possible for any believer who could read to match up what Christ said about access to God with what the Catholic Church said about it. The “priesthood of all believers” was the result.

In the new reformation, the technology of the web has made it possible for people to be the church without “the church.” Now anyone who is part of the priesthood of all believers could, if they were very intentional, create their own, or join a pre-existing, fully Christ-centered community.

This is not about 20th-century, lone-ranger Christianity, where “private faith” is what’s important, accountability is non-existent and commitment is quaint.

I’m suggesting that we now have the tools and the conditions that could allow for a faithful believer to join himself to a self-organized community of fellow believers who intentionally devote themselves to sound teaching, perhaps through videoteaching.com, share their lives and work with common purpose, guided by the Holy Spirit, to bring the love of Jesus to the world.

Is that not theologically legitimate church? Could you not have a physical campus-less church and still be the church as Christ intended it?

What I think about often is how inefficient the current structure of the church today really is if it is supposed to be all about making disciples of Jesus.

Think about how much money is locked up in land and buildings. Think about how much money relatively small congregations spend on supporting pastors and administrative staff when they simply cannot — and don’t have to — compete with the incredible teaching resources now available online or in your corner Christian bookstore. Wouldn’t the leadership of mature believers be sufficient to provide solid pastoral guidance?

Think about how few smaller congregations are contagious about their love of Jesus.

Is the disciple-making machinery of church the worship service or the community the worship service creates?

If the technology is here, or coming soon, where sophisticated worship services can be experienced in all their intensity anywhere in HD, the real work ahead for the church is learning how to guide and manage community, the kind of authentic community that, in Acts, added to its number daily and changed the history of the world.

I think a lot is going to boil down to questions about what’s the role of the weekly service in daily worship? And how important will it be to have a weekly physical gathering spot that belongs uniquely to a specific community of believers?

Those are the kinds of weighty issues the Web Church is field-testing. Nothing less.

Thoughts?

Filed under: community, discipleship, evangelism, ruminations, web campus , community, community management, discipleship, social action, web campus

Web church prepares a way in the wilderness

As a techno-evangelist, I pray I’ll never embrace technology uncritically.

Technology should always be a tool first. A way of life only when necessary. Never an idol. And as much as possible a way to connect, not disconnect, us from the relationships that should be primary in our lives.

That’s why I’ve appreciated John Dyer’s new blog. His most recent post about technology and “presence” was particularly fascinating for me since I had waded into these deep waters just a few weeks before.

John does a great job of laying a stronger theological foundation, and I think we’re largely in agreement that the use of writing in the early church as way to bridge distance and unify the early church means we can’t “argue against online church without also calling into question many other uses of technology in the Church.”

I’m with John entirely on the idea that fullness of physical presence should always be a goal whenever possible, although I do think video, and eventually holograms, will radically mess up what that means.

I’ve got just two quibbles:

No. 1: I see pastoral care over a community of believers who see themselves in community with each other is a major and weighty part of my role. For me, video on demand should not be confused with a web campus. I want to explore bodly ways in which we can use video to pour into people’s lives in discipleship, but without creating connecting tissue between believers online, we don’t have a body and we don’t represent Christ.

What that doesn’t mean is that I think physical churches do community better. They suck at it for the most part, as I mentioned here in response to John Saddington’s excellent post.

No. 2: We’ve got to get real about assumption that our web church experiment is a simple choice between “easy church” and “hard church.” I’m certain that John’s list of “people living overseas, hospital patients, and parents of new babies” might be a huge part of our demographic. But when Christianity is literally dying out in Post-Christian Europe, it seems to me, as a British native, that it’s a choice between “church and no church.”

The web church with its accessibility, lower level of apparent commitment, and enmeshing in a network that destroys social barriers provides a critical on-ramp onto the narrow highway that leads to life. (Matthew 7:14.)

My goal as a web campus pastor (and thought-leader) is to make our church’s methods of worshiping God and forming community far more flexible, only so that we can remove every unnecessary obstacle toward the lost seeing Christ face-to-face and joining themselves to his body.

In my view it is honoring God’s command to prepare a way in the wilderness. (Isaiah 40:3)

Filed under: community, discipleship, evangelism, ruminations, web campus , community, culture, discipleship, evangelism