A Mentor's Observations

This is, at the moment, an unauthorized repost of a newsletter by http://www.plumblineministries.com/. I would normally get permission first but I doubt they care. I found it a really good observation of some movements in the Spirit I and several of my friends have observed. As a non-institutional Christian I take flack for being anti church. It's difficult to say things like, "institutional churches are not biblical," and not sound pretty anti-Church. The truth is that as sovereign as God is we have freedom of choice, including freedom to fall far short of what He really wants from us. To say that God didn't intend church to be done only one way isn't to say that God won't bless this church or that in their efforts on his behalf.

One thing that can be empirically established is that in the last thirty years churches have lost their ability to serve the needs of their people. Many people, such as myself, sought out alternative was to maintain a relationship with God and have been just as blessed. That doesn't mean that God has abandoned institutional churches or their workers. I hope you enjoy this post.

A HUGE transition in the Church:
Up until the 1970s churches were primarily vertical communities. The pastor was the leader and people looked to him for wisdom and nurture. It was a simple format that had worked well for centuries.

Then something happened.

Intercession broke out and it accidentally changed the Body of Christ from a focus on vertical communities to the widespread establishment of horizontal communities.


The Tension
When intercessors first became an identified group in the church, there was nearly universal conflict between the intercessors and their pastors. I remember being a pastor and sitting in formal and informal discussions about what the pastors could do to protect themselves and their churches from “those intercessors.”

Pastors found their leadership and their legitimacy challenged by having a tribe of people in the church who each had their own hotline to God. Furthermore they weren’t the least bit shy about going right over the pastor’s head to get their instructions directly from God.

If intercessors had only used their hotline to get information about their own lives, it might have been more palatable to pastors, but all too often intercessors felt they had heard things from God that the pastor needed to know. Since the pastors had clearly not heard from God themselves on those matters, the intercessors generously shared their superior insight with the pastors.

Pastors broadly did not appreciate being led by their sheep.

The problem was exacerbated by many intercessors gathering people around them and becoming de facto leaders within the church but without authorization from above and that caused the pastors to become even more nervous.

Add to this a few very immature intercessors who handled themselves, their insights and their nascent leadership very poorly and the stage was set for a the tension to escalate into open conflict between pastors and intercessors.


The Pain
Pastors were facing a double bind.

On the one hand, those pesky intercessors were often the church leaders who had demonstrated deep loyalty to the pastor and the church in the past. They were usually high energy people who invested more deeply than most in the things they believed in.

On the other hand.....they sure were disrupting things on every level

While that controversy was still raging, I left the pastorate and became one of “them”. I was now hearing the angst from the other side of the table.

At the least, intercessors felt abandoned by pastors who did not understand them and at worst, betrayed.

Intercessors were broadly unsure of themselves. They were simply seeking to explore a new high risk area and at the very moment when they needed emotional support, pastoral nurture and wise direction the most, their long established leaders were suddenly unavailable, or were trying to shut down this new tool from God.


The Technological Factor
At this time, two technological developments massively turbocharged the emerging crisis.

First we had the emergence of e-mail and second the restructuring of long distance phone rates. Both of these suddenly allowed people to communicate across wide distances at minimal cost. And that changed the face of Christendom.

As intercessors became desperate for insight into this new theology and for emotional support in the increasingly lonely pilgrimage, they began to reach outside their once closed vertical communities to anyone who had insight or compassion. Since this was a widespread move of God, it was easy to find kindred spirits elsewhere.

Initially there were simply spontaneous relational networks formed. Friends introduced friends to their friends. The primary question each newcomer asked was not church allegiance but the functionality of the other person’s Christianity. When someone knew something about intercession that worked, everyone else wanted to know that principle.

Informal networks became formalized networks as natural leaders emerged and gave direction, legitimacy and comfort to intercessors.

Suddenly we had tens of thousands of people who were walking in dual alignment. Most of them were still a part of their vertical communities but they also had a casual to deep relationship with some horizontal networks that crossed huge theological boundaries.


Diversification
While intercessors were the special interest group God used to spearhead the transition, hundreds of other pain points were also converted into horizontal communities in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Imagine that you were the only parent of an autistic child in your church. However well meaning your pastor might be, the probability is that he has not invested deeply in learning the nuances of what it is like to parent such a child, and what a pastor needs to do to shepherd you.

However, even if you are stuck in East Overshoe, Iowa, the phone and e-mail allow you to find people all over the country who are walking the same path. They willingly share their wisdom and help carry your pain. Another horizontal community developed to meet a deep need that was not being met in the vertical community.

Every imaginable felt need in the church became fertile ground for people to find others who had pain or wisdom and to build unstructured, spontaneous relationships from a distance.


The Judgment
For ten to twenty years, the two kinds of communities co-existed. Over time, however, comparisons began surfacing. In the market based economy of the American church, people became more and more insistent on having their needs met.

The leaders of the vertical communities tried heroically to serve every imaginable need with excellence, only to fall short of the expectations of the spiritual and emotional consumer.

The dually aligned visionaries led the charge. They sat in judgment on the vertical communities and decided that their needs were not being met, so they did what was unthinkable 25 years earlier and simply left the vertical church community.

The pastors reciprocated with judgment of their own and prophesied the wrath of God upon all those sinners who were outside the pale of legitimate Christianity.

There was anguished soul searching on the part of those who in no way wanted to be outside the will of God, but they just could not find a place within the vertical communities that even remotely compared with the life giving exchanges they enjoyed in their horizontal communities.

So the courageous ones left with fear, shame and relief. Their friends waited and watched to see if the devil would devour them since they were living without spiritual covering and not joining weekly with other believers.


The Verdict
To the consternation of the pastors, 20 years later it is quite evident that God has not unleashed immediate or delayed punishment on those who left. The demographics are the same for believers inside and outside the vertical communities.

Some are blessed, some struggle, some thrive, some are devoured. Whatever the variables that produce the different outcomes, church membership does not register as being statistically significant on any scale of Christian wellbeing. People in a local church are devoured or blessed depending on how they walk out their faith. Period. Great spiritual catastrophes occur with regularity among people who are deeply vested in vertical communities.

The same goes for those outside. They are neither immune from spiritual disasters, nor unusually prone to them.

In 2008, membership in the local church cannot possibly be considered essential to one’s spiritual vitality.

After observing that the judgment of God did not fall, millions more believers exited the vertical communities.


The Frustration
Horizontal communities experienced a shake out in the early 21st century. Many of them had become highly centralized, providing all the down side of the vertical communities with few of the benefits. People found that it was generally not traumatic to leave a horizontal community. You just quietly drifted away. Often no one noticed.

At the same time more and more people realized that a virtual community lacked some of the dynamics of a human community.

Many were torn deeply between the yearning for corporate worship and the continued frustration with vertical communities.


The New Vertical Communities
Out of the gently swirling unsettledness is emerging a different kind of vertical community and that is one that is more narrow and is focused on a particular niche.

I know of churches that are deeply invested in serving the special needs families. Every family who attends has a child with cerebral palsy, or Downs Syndrome or some other impairment, as well as children who are not physically limited. The church culture is designed to facilitate this.

There are churches that are mostly focused on worship, or deliverance, or missions, or the prophetic, or inner healing. The drive to meet everyone’s need has been replaced with a focus on a niche community.

I was amused to read recently of a new niche church: They only allow men to come because men have special needs that must be addressed in particular ways.

Oh, well!


The New Leadership Style
Along with the changing target audience, there is emerging a new flavor of leadership that is more deeply focused on transformation. Each special needs group has its own issues and they expect their leadership to ferret out the answers from the Word of God to allow them to thrive, in spite of the real and imaginary obstacles that they face.

America’s churches are still driven by a free market economy. Competition for members still runs the gamut from flagrant and repulsive to suave and subtle. But now the competition is in a different key of music.

Thirty years ago, churches competed by being full service. Whatever experience you wanted, they claimed to be able to deliver it. Now pastors have learned from the nurture that went on in the horizontal communities that their “consumers” want real answers. They are competing based on the degree of transformational truth they bring to the table, which translates into more of a fathering style of leadership.


The Biblicity of Niche Communities
Consider the similarities and differences between Jesus’ community and John the Baptists’.

Both men were deeply committed to the will of God. Neither was trying to build an empire at the expense of others. Both loved and respected the other. Their messages were identical: “Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”

They had the same enemies. They shared some disciples. They preached to the same crowds, sometimes as little as five miles apart. Neither had a building or meeting place.

You would think that on paper, they would be ideal candidates for a unity crusade.

However, Jesus never made a move toward doing anything jointly. He understood the very dissimilar culture of the two groups.

John was an ascetic. He was harsh, slamming those who came saying they had repented and rebuking them for not having repented enough. He never did a miracle. He was not known for any softer, gentler qualities. He was the distilled essence of a crusty prophet.

Jesus publicly body slammed quite a few more people with His words than John did, but He also had a more inclusive style. He would visit with sinners and even eat a meal with them. When his disciples messed up, He would query them in private instead of shredding them publicly.

These two ministry cultures were both of God, but they were wildly different.

And God was really OK with it.

We see the same thing with the 12 tribes of Israel. Each one had a different redemptive gift. Each vigorously maintained their own individuality while remaining part of a collective nation.

And God was OK with that too.


So What?
On an individual level, this ongoing retooling of the form of the American church has caused a lot of anguish.

However, on a macro level, one has to stand back and marvel at the masterpiece of God as He accomplished two staggeringly contradictory agendas on a nationwide level in just a few decades.

I believe the two objectives were unity and diversity.

The clarion call to unity was clearly heard in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Many interpreted that as institutional partnership (like Jesus and John running a joint baptismal service) but God had a different plan. He has created a stunning level of unity in the pew which was not there before.

It is very hard to find a church of over 100 today that is homogeneous. Most churches in America have people from at least half a dozen different theological backgrounds all worshipping together. The lesson learned from the era of horizontal communities is that what matters is effectiveness, not abstract theology.

When Christians meet nowadays, they don’t ask about the other person’s spiritual pedigree. They want to know about their pilgrimage. And if you have a truth that works for you, they want to know it. The cross pollination of growth tools in the Body of Christ today has brought about a staggering unity in the pew that we could not have imagined a few years ago.

People today broadly do not care about denominational constructs. They simply want to find a Christianity that is real and is functional. Will what you know help them grow? If so, they could care less what the denominational connections are of the person who brought them the truth.

God has produced a masterpiece. Unity is here in an unparalleled fashion, brought about by a masterfully executed process in the hand of the Head of the Church.

Yet at the same time, God wanted churches to move more toward their individual callings. The congregations that understand their redemptive gift and know how to express it in a precise fashion are experiencing the greatest grace from God.

The denominational streams represented a beautiful diversity of the Body of Christ, each expressing a portion of the river of God’s grace. God wanted far more diversity than that, so, wonderfully, gloriously, amazingly, at the same time that He was creating overall unity in the Body of Christ, He was also engendering a dramatic increase in the diversity of His Bride.

Only my God could conceive and execute a strategy so astounding as to magnificently accomplish two seemingly polar opposite objectives at one time.

He is the Great King.

Arthur Burk
Feb. 8, 2008