It’s time we start being brutally honest about the missional movement that has emerged in the last 10-15 years: Chances are better than not it’s going to fail.

That may seem cynical, but I’m being realistic. There is a reason so many movements in the Western church have failed in the past century: They are a car without an engine. A missional church or a missional community or a missional small group is the new car that everyone is talking about right now, but no matter how beautiful or shiny the vehicle, without an engine, it won’t go anywhere.

So what is the engine of the church? Discipleship. I’ve said it many times: If you make disciples, you will always get the church. But if you try to build the church, you will rarely get disciples.

If you’re good at making disciples, you’ll get more leaders than you’ll know what to do with. If you make disciples like Jesus made them, you’ll see people come to faith who didn’t know Him. If you disciple people well, you will always get the missional thing. Always.

We took 30 days and examined the Twitter conversations happening. We discovered there are between 100-150 times as many people talking about mission as there are discipleship (to be clear, that’s a 100:1). We are a group of people addicted to and obsessed with the work of the Kingdom, with little to no idea how to be with the King. As Skye Jethani wrote in his Out of Ur post a little while back “Has Mission become an Idol?”:

Many church leaders unknowingly replace the transcendent vitality of a life with God for the ego satisfaction they derive from a life for God.

Look, I’m not criticizing the people who are passionate about mission…I am one of those people. I was one of the people pioneering Missional Communities in the 1980′s and have been doing it ever since. This is my camp, my tribe, my people. But it has to be said: God did not design us to do Kingdom mission outside of the scope of intentional, biblical discipleship and if we don’t see that, we’re fooling ourselves. Mission is under the umbrella of discipleship as it is one of the many things that Jesus taught his disciples to do well. But it wasn’t done in a vacuum outside of knowing God and being shaped by that relationship, where a constant refinement of their character was happening alongside of their continued skill development (which included mission).

The truth about discipleship is that it’s never hip and it’s never in style…it’s the call to come and die; a “long obedience in the same direction.” While the “missional” conversation is imbued with the energy and vitality that comes with kingdom work, it seems to be missing some of the hallmark reality that those of us who have lived it over time have come to expect: Mission is messy. It’s humbling. There’s often no glory in it. It’s for the long haul. And it’s completely unsustainable without discipleship.

This is the crux of it: The reason the missional movement may fail is because most people/communities in the Western church are pretty bad at making disciples. Without a plan for making disciples (and a plan that works), any missional thing you launch will be completely unsustainable. Think about it this way: Sending people out to do mission is to send them out to a war zone. Discipleship is not only the boot camp to train them for the front lines, but the hospital when they get wounded and the off-duty time they need to rest and recuperate. When we don’t disciple people the way Jesus and the New Testament talked about, we are sending them out without armor, weapons or training. This is mass carnage waiting to happen. How can we be surprised that people burn out, quit and never want to return to the missional life (or the church)? How can we not expect people will feel used and abused?

There’s a story from World War II where The Red (Russian) Army sent wave after wave of untrained, practically weaponless soldiers into the thick of the German front. They were slaughtered in droves. Why did they do this? Because they knew that eventually the German soldiers would run out of ammunition, creating an opportunity for the Red Army to send in their best soldiers to finish them off. The first wave of untrained soldiers were the best way of exhausting ammunition, leaving their enemy vulnerable. While this isn’t a perfect analogy, I sense this is a bit like the missional movement right now. We are sending bright-eyed civilians into the battle where the fighting is fiercest without the equipping they need, not just to survive, but to fight well and advance the Kingdom of their dad, the King.

The missional movement will fail because, by-and-large, we are having a discussion about mission devoid of discipleship. Unless we start having more discussion about discipleship and how we make missionaries out of disciples, this movement will stall and fade. Any discussion about mission must begin with discipleship. If your church community is not yet competent at making disciples who can make disciples, please don’t send your members out on mission until you have a growing sense of confidence in your ability to train, equip and disciple them.

Here are some questions I have leaders I’m working with ask regularly:

• Am I a disciple?
• Do I know how to disciple people who can then disciple people who then disciple people, etc? (i.e. does my discipleship plan work?)
•  Does our discipleship plan naturally lead all disciples to become missionaries? (not just the elite, Delta-seal missional ninjas)

This blog post is part of a 6 week series related to the release of my new, re-written edition of Building a Discipling Culture: How to release a missional movement by discipling people like Jesus did, which shows how we made disciples in a truly post-Christian context. If you’re interested in picking it 

There’s a war brewing inside of U.S. churches. While some congregants prefer the beat-bopping sounds of electric guitars, drums and fast-paced tunes, others seek a more traditional worship experience. The divide, which often hinges upon age and personal music taste, only seems to be intensifying — especially as churches seek to modernize and attract younger audiences.

According to the USA Today, nearly 50 percent of Protestant churches are now reporting that they use electric guitars or drums during worship. This proportion has grown from 35 percent back in 2000, according to a 2010 Faith Communities Today study of 14,000 congregations across America.

While this may seem like a silly argument, there are many who feel passionately that music should be kept traditional, with a focus upon worshiping God and not engaging in the frills of percussion and guitar strumming. On the flip side, others claim that it’s necessary to change with the times. The beats and guitar jingles, they say, simply come with the territory of modernization.

But Rick Muchow, the pastor of Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, says, “The Bible does not have an official soundtrack…There are all different kinds of churches for different kinds of people. We don’t worship music, we worship God.”

This essentially means that there’s no right way to worship the Almighty through music. Some churches, though, recognizing the sensitivity inherent in churchgoers’ prerogatives, have begun to host “themed” services.

Saddleback, for instance, runs services that focus upon various genres of music. According to Muchow, his church offers gospel, rock, alternative and traditional services. Depending on one’s age and musical taste, these options would offer a more copacetic worship experience.

But there are plenty of pastors who would disagree with Saddleback’s musical selections. These much more conservative houses of worship would contend that traditional music is the way to go. Pastor David Cloud, for instance, believes that drifting away from traditional worship may have spiritual side effects.

Republican presidential hopeful, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, plays bass guitar with the praise band at the Apostolic Church of Auburn Hills in Auburn Hills, Mich. Sunday, Jan. 13, 2008.(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

“There is an intense war being waged today for the heart and soul of Bible-believing churches, and one of the Devil’s most effective Trojan horses is music,” he says.

Cloud has gone so far as to launch a web directory that lists Independent Baptist Churches in North America that pledge to stick to the King James Version of the Bible. Additionally, the listed houses of worship ban any and all contemporary music.

This battle is likely to continue raging, especially as contemporary music continues to increase in popularity. What do you think — should churches focus more upon traditional, contemporary or a mixture of the two?

“I think it would be perfectly safe to say that the church of Christ was never in all its history so fully, so skillfully and so thoroughly and so perfectly organized as it is today. Our machinery is wonderful; it is just perfect, but, alas, it is machinery without power; and when things do not go right, instead of going to the real source of our failure, our neglect to depend on God and look to God for power, we look around to see if there is not some new organization we can get up, some new wheel that we can add to our machinery. We have altogether too many wheels already. What we need is not so much some new organization, some new wheel, but “the Spirit of the living creature in the wheels” we already possess.”

Guided Sight

Signs and Serendipity

A chance encounter reminds us that God prepares us for many things, if we’re paying attention.

By Marcia Morrissey, September 22, 2011

After church last Sunday we decided to go out to lunch. It became one of those serendipitous experiences. We had planned to go to one place, but at the last minute Ed decided he wanted Chilis. At the table next to us was a family with three young children. I heard the youngest one making noises, and saying, “hi,” repeatedly—nothing unusual in a family restaurant. Ed was talking back to her, and said to the parents that she was a “cutie.” I had looked over and smiled their way, but when the mom said that her 14-month-old was deaf, and she was just learning to speak because she had had a cochlear implant, that caught my interest.

Ed, of course, had noticed that she was deaf because he could see her implant. We then got into a friendly discussion. A few minutes into talking with them, I mentioned losing my eyesight in my early 20s. I had assumed that they could tell, but apparently they couldn’t. Our conversation took off at that point with this family speaking of disabilities, and advances in technology that weren’t available only a few years ago. The mom felt very comfortable sharing with us how reluctant she’d been about having her daughter’s surgery done, and her husband’s belief in giving their daughter as much of an advantage as possible.

In preparing for the surgery, the parents had discovered that they both were carriers of a gene that caused this type of profound congenital deafness. Their other two children were able to hear.

This little 14-month-old was saying “hi,” and “bye,” while waving her hand at Ed the whole time. Mom told us that she was so excited to be able to hear sounds that she had never heard before, and was also enjoying speaking and making sounds herself as does any little one that age learning to talk. She was enthusiastically sharing her newfound ability with us!

The doctors told them there was no longer a need for their daughter to learn sign language, but the parents disagreed. The implant, after all, comes out at night, for bedtime, and it is not used when bathing. Their daughter is still deaf, even with the implant, so why not learn both?

Interestingly, the mother already knew sign language! In college she had to take two years of a foreign language with her major. She attempted German, but was having a terrible time with that. She then was happy to learn that she could take sign language as an option to fulfill this requirement. She believed that there was a Providential “hand directing her” toward sign language all those years ago.

How frequently we find that something we believe was thrust upon us by accident ends up being an experience that has a hand in the rest of our lives.

After the surgery, the little girl had to wear two hearing aids for awhile to see if that would make any difference. It is a step in the process. Probably because I was blind, she felt comfortable sharing several incidents of people saying things that were likely well-meaning, but thoughtless, and were hurtful to her. She told of a woman at the grocery store who saw her baby with the hearing aids, and asked why she was wearing them. When the mom explained, the woman said how sad it was that her baby was deaf, and asked if she was “dumb,” as well. She realized that this woman meant that word to mean unable to speak, but it has taken on a much different connotation, and she was very hurt at this remark.

I always know when people are desperately searching for the politically-correct term for blind when speaking to me. They are trying so hard to be considerate that I try to put them at ease and tell them it is okay with me to say the word “blind.” I shared that, and a couple of my own stories, and she felt a bit better. Most people just don’t know what to say to someone who lives life a little differently from the norm, and it becomes easier, sometimes, to just let it go, or to nicely make it a teachable moment without offending the befuddled person.

Unfortunately sometimes some people just come off patronizing, and then is time to be a bit more direct.

We were about to leave, and she had gotten up to take her 4-year-old daughter to the restroom. She came over to shake our hands, and to say how nice it was to meet and talk to us. I could hear the smile, and gratitude in the voice of this mom to have had this opportunity. A moment of serendipity—yes, but I got the feeling we all felt perhaps a “hand at work” in this “chance meeting.”

Who is filling the pews in American churches? It is increasingly likely that they won’t be working class white people, according to new research.

While religious service attendance has decreased for all white Americans since the early 1970s, the rate of decline has been more than twice as high for less educated, lower and lower-middle class whites compared to more educated and presumably more affluent whites, according to a study presented Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Las Vegas.

“My assumption going into this research was that middle America was more religious and conservative in general than more educated America,” study author Brad Wilcox told msnbc.com. “But what is surprising about this is that when it comes to religion as well as marriage, we find that the college educated are more conventional in their lifestyle than middle Americans.”

In the last four decades, monthly (or more) participation in religious services dropped from 50 percent of moderately educated (high school and perhaps some college) whites to 37 percent, according to the study, “No Money, No Honey, No Church: The Deinstitutionalization of Religious Life Among the White Working Class.” Attendance by the least educated (high school dropouts) dropped from 38 percent to 23 percent, by sociologists Wilcox, of the University of Virginia and Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University found.

Church attendance by higher-income whites with at least a bachelor’s degree barely dipped, from 50 percent to 46 percent.

The figures represented those aged 25-44 and were gathered from two national surveys, the General Social Survey from the National Opinion Research Center, and the National Survey of Family Growth, which is conducted by the U.S. government’s National Center for Health Statistics. The new study focused on white Americans because black and Latino religious worship is less divided by education and income, the researchers said.

Most whites who report a religious affiliation are Catholic, evangelical Protestant, mainstream Protestant, Mormon or Jewish.

In their paper, Cherlin and Wilcox attribute the falloff to two things: “the deteriorating labor market position of the moderately educated, and cultural changes that have made non-marital family forms more acceptable.”

This is a kind of melding of the two researchers’ differing world views. Wilcox, who is affiliated with the Institute for American Values founded by David Blankenhorn, a leading opponent of same-sex marriage, argues that the loosening of sexual and marital norms, and less restrictive divorce laws, have had disastrous effects on society — such as higher divorce rates, and extramarital sex — and have lessened religion’s influence on the average American.

Wilcox thinks part of the church-going falloff may be due to the reluctance of divorced people to join congregations where most people are married.

Cherlin tends to emphasize the impact of unemployment and wage struggle as a social disrupter. People who have been unemployment at some point over the last 10 years go to religious service less often, the researchers found.

Stephanie Coontz, professor of history and family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, thinks there has been a general and widespread loss of faith, not just in religion, but in many institutions.

“I relate it to all the certainties [Americans once had], the sense of entitlement people held in the post- World War II era,” Coontz, author of “A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s,” said. “We thought the world would get better, and there was solidarity in this country. Inequality was decreasing and if you were willing to work, you could get a job.”

The wealthier one is, the more one is likely to think that this social compact, which included church-going, still holds. But for many this no longer exists. As it has eroded, Coontz said, it has taken commitment to traditional religious institutions along with it.

Mars Hill Church is coming to town.

Pastor Mark Driscoll’s megachurch recently announced plans to expand into Portland, Oregon, and Orange County, California, using multi-site campuses that feature live bands and a sermon piped in from the main campus in Seattle.

The move is part of a trend among megachurches to extend their brand of church to new communities, in hopes of reaching unchurched people with the gospel. But critics fear the out-of-state campuses turn churches into franchises like McDonald’s or Starbucks.

The reason for the new campuses is simple, according to the Mars Hill website.

“Oregon needs Jesus Christ,” claims the introduction of the new location. “The city of Portland is known for many things, but the gospel of Jesus is nowhere on the list.”

Bob Hyatt, pastor of the Evergreen Community in Portland, agrees that people in his city need to hear about Jesus.

But he has some doubts about Mars Hill’s method, which seems to him more like corporate expansion than church planting. “If you are a church planter in Portland, it’s a bit like reading the notice that Wal-Mart is coming and you are the mom-and-pop store,” he said.

Hyatt is also concerned about the long-term health of the out-of-state campus model. Rather than building up a local body of believers, he said, these campuses are dependent on having a celebrity pastor for their survival.

“It’s not just an extreme example of the church-celebrity model,” he said. “It’s complete capitulation. It’s enshrining that into the DNA of the church.”

Mars Hill isn’t the only megachurch to cross state lines.

Lifechurch.tv, based in Edmond, Oklahoma, has 14 campuses—10 in Oklahoma, along with sites in New York, Florida, Texas, and Tennessee. Seacoast Church, a megachurch near Charleston, S.C., has 13 locations in three states. Bethel World Outreach Center in Brentwood, Tennessee, recently started campuses in Phoenix and Dallas.

The surge is being driven by technology breakthroughs, said Warren Bird, research director at Leadership Network and co-author of Multisite Church Roadtrip. “First churches discover that multi-site works, and then they begin to ask if they’re really dependent on geographical proximity,” he said. “As North Point’s Andy Stanley often describes, they first jumped 10 yards and found multi-site works just fine through back-to-back auditoriums. Then they jumped 10 miles to their first campus. Then they asked, ‘Then would it work 100 or 1,000 miles away?’”

Not all of the out-of-state campuses have been successful.

LifeChurch.tv started campuses in the Phoenix suburbs of Mesa and Gilbert back in 2005. Those campuses are no longer listed as active on the church’s website.

Bobby Gruenwald, innovation leader at Lifechurch.tv, said that the church’s approach to out-of-state campuses has evolved. The key to success is finding local leaders and making sure the church meets the needs of its local community.

“The biggest thing we’ve learned is the importance of adapting what we do to the specific needs of the community and size of the campus,” he said.

Jeff Kinney, regional pastor for Seacoast, agrees. He said that a megachurch’s brand name alone doesn’t guarantee success for an out-of-state campus.

Kinney said that local and distant campuses operate differently. Those close by draw people who are already familiar with Seacoast. In some ways, they serve as high-quality overflow rooms; the main job of the campus pastor is to duplicate the experience of the main campus.

Distant campuses, like the one in Asheville, North Carolina, are more like church plants. That’s because a church’s brand name can have limited appeal.We thought going to Asheville—we’d put a sign on the marquee and people would show up,” Kinney said.

That didn’t happen. Instead, that campus draws people who didn’t know anything about Seacoast. “These guys function more as entrepreneurial pastors,” he said.

Bethel has tried a hybrid approach to its out-of-state campuses. All of its locations have a live preacher, while administrative tasks such as payroll and accounting are done from its central office.

Pastor Rice Broocks said that more local congregations of all kinds—independent churches, denominational churches, and multisite campuses—are needed.

“The more options you have, the more chances there are to reach people.”

My family used to play “Where’s Waldo?” with a three-toed sloth at the zoo; eventually we’d find him suspended like a hammock from a tree branch above us. I used to think he got a bad rap as nature’s laziest creature. After all, I don’t have the strength to hold myself upside down on a set of monkey bars for 10 seconds. Then a zoo volunteer explained that sloths have curved claws that allow them to dig into branches and hang without effort. Our sloth, it turns out, really was as unmotivated as he looked.

I found myself thinking about that lethargic critter the other day while listening to a recorded Eugene Peterson lecture and arguing with my MP3 player.

Peterson: Pastors are highly susceptible to the sin of sloth.

Me: What are you talking about? Pastors are some of the most overworked people alive.

Peterson: Sloth is most often evidenced in busyness … in frantic running around, trying to be everything to everyone, and then having no time to listen or pray, no time to become the person who is doing these things.

Score one for Peterson.

I’m not a pastor. But I am busy, like almost everyone I know. When Peterson declares that “the pastor’s primary responsibility is to keep the community attentive to God,” I can readily apply that job description to my roles as wife, mother, musician, and author. The mandate can be stated even more succinctly regarding my task as a human: Pay attention to God. If I don’t, I’m guilty of spiritual sloth, no matter how hard I’m working. In truth, there is an inverse relationship between how overwhelmed I am doing things and how much energy I can give to being attentive.

But did I mention I’m really busy?

Part of the problem is that spiritual receptivity requires unglamorous practices like prayer, time in Scripture, and attentiveness to what God is doing in the people around me. Telling me, “Prayer promotes spiritual growth!” has as much wow-factor as announcing, “Reducing calories leads to weight loss!” I want something new—a development that will lead to breakthrough. Peterson observes that spiritual disciplines have “not been tried and discarded because [they] didn’t work, but tried and found difficult (and more than a little tedious) and so shelved in favor of something or other that could be fit into a busy [person's] schedule.”

Scheduling is no small matter. Attending takes time without offering quantifiable results. It requires stillness in a culture that rewards industriousness. It’s inefficient in a world that considers getting things done next to godliness. A pastor who refuses to be slothful in the areas of silence and reflection stands a good chance of getting fired.

Our emphasis on external productivity over internal fidelity goes back a long way. Consider the case of King Saul, reported in 1 Samuel 13. Early in his kingship, Saul and the prophet Samuel had an understanding: Samuel would lead the people spiritually, and Saul would lead militarily. However, holed up with his troops facing a brigade of Philistines, Saul faced a dilemma. Samuel failed to show up on time to offer the sacrifice that Saul and his men relied on to keep them in God’s favor. As typically happens when things go off schedule, disorganization set in. The longer Saul waited, the more restless his men became; he was losing them.

Saul did what any good manager would do. He took action. He offered the sacrifice himself.

If I were conducting Saul’s job evaluation, I’d give him a bonus. He took initiative and solved the problem, saving time and boosting morale in the process. But Samuel didn’t see it that way. He told Saul he had failed to keep God’s command, and thus would be deposed by an incoming king—a “man after God’s own heart” better suited for the job.

God is not looking for leaders who take matters into their own hands. He values faithfulness over efficiency. It’s no good to organize the whole world yet be oblivious to the God who created it and holds it together. Yes, we have practical commitments we need to take seriously. But part of being responsible is being response-able: centering our lives in such a way that we can respond to the world around us with the mind of Christ. Such response-ability is impossible if our obligations crowd out any opportunity to get to know him better.

It makes sense that the sloth is the official mascot of spiritual lethargy. I’ve begun to see my incessant busyness as the set of claws that keep me holding on for dear life, dug in, hanging upside down, not getting anywhere. With God’s help, I want to let go, trusting him to show me how to live right side up. My job is to pay attention.

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