031020755X_relation_fm.qxp 9/8/06 2:21 PM Page 1

This page is intentionally left blank

Mark Driscoll will keep you riveted with his personal and sometimes

irreverent account of the planting and growth of Mars Hill Church in

Seattle. Be warned — this book is not for the faint of heart! Mark writes

in the honest, straightforward, street-level vocabulary of his church’s

target audience. I found it refreshingly honest, entertaining, and challenging and would highly recommend it to anyone who is serious about

trying to reach those who have grown up in a postmodern world.

— Dr. Gary B. Zustiak, Director of Youth Ministries

and Resources, Christ in Youth

Brutal, honest, attractively offensive, and long overdue! Mark Driscoll

courageously reveals the inner workings of his church and his shepherd’s heart. This book is a must-read for any pastor who is trying

to reach the lost and keep his biblical convictions intact. Mark is a

brother who speaks for my generation of emerging leaders. He boldly

goes where no shepherd has gone before.

— Grant Fishbook, Christ the King Community Church

For some, this book will inspire and energize you to keep going as a

church on a mission for Jesus. For others, it may rekindle the sense of

passion and mission you lost years ago. For others, it may awaken you

to the realization that you have only been going through the motions

of church and never really experienced the joy of serving Jesus as a

missional church. Whatever the case, after reading this book, you will

never go back to being an inwardly focused church without a mission.

— Dan Kimball, author of The Emerging Church

I walked with Mark as a friend through many of the stories in this

book. Reading it was a great reminder of how faithful our God is. Mark

gives the straight story on his journey in church-planting, pulling no

punches. This book is a great encouragement to anyone wanting to

plant a church or living in the trenches of ministry.

— Rick McKinley, Pastor, Imago Dei Community; author of Jesus in the Margins

Mark combines penetrating insights into effective biblical ministry in

the emerging culture with a deeply personal portrait of his struggles

to learn how to be a pastor. People with a passion to be missional will

resonate with Mars Hill Church’s story of implementing their vision

to create a healthy body of believers in the least-churched city in the

least-churched state in the country.

— Gerry Breshears, Professor of Theology, Western Seminary

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 1

02/03/06 11:44:05 AM

Other Books by Mark Driscoll

The Radical Reformission: Reaching Out without Selling Out

The Leadership Network Innovation Series

Confessions of a Reformission Rev.: Hard Lessons from an

Emerging Missional Church, Mark Driscoll

The Multi-Site Church Revolution: Being One Church in

Many Locations, Geoff Surratt, Greg Ligon, and Warren Bird

Other titles forthcoming

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 2

02/03/06 11:44:07 AM

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 3

02/03/06 11:44:07 AM

ZONDERVAN

Confessions of a Reformission Rev.

Copyright © 2006 by Mark Driscoll

All rights reserved under International and Pan -American Copyright Conventions. By payment of

the required fees, you have been granted the non -exclusive, non-transferable right to access and

read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down

loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage

and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known

or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Zondervan.

AER Edition January 2009 ISBN : 978-0-310-31512-4

Requests for information should be addressed to:

Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Driscoll, Mark.

Confessions of a reformission rev. : hard lessons from an emerging missional

church / Mark Driscoll.

p. cm. — (The leadership network innovation series)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13:

978-0-310-27016-4

ISBN-10:

0-310-27016-2

1. Driscoll, Mark, 1970 – 2. Evangelists — United States — Biography.

3. Mars Hill Church (Seattle, Wash.) — History. I. Title. II. Series.

BV3785.D75A3 2006

280'.4 — dc22

2005032306

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible:

New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International

Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

The website addresses recommended throughout this book are offered as a resource to

you. These websites are not intended in any way to be or imply an endorsement on the

part of Zondervan, nor do we vouch for their content for the life of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval

system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other — except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without

the prior permission of the publisher.

06 07 08 09 10 11 12 • 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 4

02/03/06 11:44:08 AM

Contents

Acknowledgments 7

Prelude 9

0. Ten Curious Questions

13

1. Jesus, Our Offering Was $137 and I Want to Use It to Buy Bullets

37

0 – 45 People

2. Jesus, If Anyone Else Calls My House,

I May Be Seeing You Real Soon

57

45 – 75 People

3. Jesus, Satan Showed Up and I Can’t Find My Cup

73

75 – 150 People

4. Jesus, Could You Please Rapture the Charismaniac Lady

Who Brings Her Tambourine to Church?

91

150 – 350 People

5. Jesus, Why Am I Getting Fatter and Meaner?

115

350 – 1,000 People

6. Jesus, Today We Voted to Take a Jackhammer to Your Big Church

139

1,000 – 4,000 People

7. Jesus, We’re Loading Our Squirt Guns to Charge Hell Again

163

4,000 – 10,000 People

Appendix 1 — The Junk Drawer: Answers to Common Questions

188

Appendix 2 — Distinctives of Larger Churches

195

Notes 198

About the Publisher

209

Share Your Thoughts

210

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 5

02/03/06 11:44:08 AM

031020755X_relation_fm.qxp 9/8/06 2:21 PM Page 1

This page is intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

I want to thank the following people for their insights, which helped

to shape this book:

God the Ghost has repeatedly saved me from myself.

Bob Buford, Linda Stanley, and Dave Travis of Leadership

Network have generously invested in me since the early

days of our church.

Jon Phelps of DC – 3 Entertainment has been a mentor in ways

of which he is unaware.

Gib Martin is a wonderful encouragement as my father-in-law.

My first pastor, Doug Busby, gave me a love for Scripture,

Jesus, and the church.

Ed Stetzer has helped clarify my understanding of missiology.

Tim Keller and John Piper have been insightful theological

mentors.

Larry Osborne has graciously contributed insights into my life

and church.

The Mars Hill elders are great brothers for making sanctified

trouble.

My brothers in Acts 29 are a constant source of inspiration.

My research assistant, Crystal, spent numerous hours

preparing the endnotes for this book.

John Vaughan kindly shared his vast knowledge of

megachurches.

My wife, Grace, a.k.a. “Beauty,” and our five kids are the best

part of my life.

7

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 7

02/03/06 11:44:08 AM

Have fun reading my daddy’s book.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 8

02/03/06 11:44:09 AM

Prelude

I sure hope this book helps your ministry.

I have made so many mistakes as a pastor that I should be pumping gas for a living instead of preaching the gospel. This book is my

telling of the blow-by-blow history of Mars Hill Church, which we

planted in Seattle, the great city that I love like a drunk uncle. We

named the church after the place where Paul preached to the great

pagan city of Athens with cultural relevance by quoting their poets

and artists. In retrospect, the name of our church is kind of dumb

and sounds more like a cult than a church, which, sad to say, actually benefits us in a city where words like Jesus and Chris tian are far

more offensive than four-letter cuss words.

When we started Mars Hill, I was in my midtwenties, with a

handful of people and about six years of faith in Christ to draw

on. We had the crazy dream of making a difference in one of the

nation’s least-churched cities, where only 8 percent of the population is evangelical Chris tian and 86 percent does not attend a worship ser vice of any religion during an average week.1

Today our dream is alive and well. Our church attendance is running over 4,000 people a week. Of the more than 400,000 churches in

the United States, we are among the sixty fastest-growing churches

according to Outreach magazine, and one of the twenty-five most

influential churches in America according to a survey conducted by

John Vaughan and reported in The Church Report.2 In saying this,

I am not boasting but rather pointing out the obvious miracle of

God that we are a part of. In fact, my previous ministry experience

would not fill up a three-by-five-inch notecard. Basically, we are a

kite in God’s hurricane, which is an absolute joke for reasons that

will become apparent as you read through the book.

9

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 9

02/03/06 11:44:13 AM

10 • Confessions of a Reformission Rev.

We started the church to fill what I saw as the gap of eighteen-to thirty-five-year-olds who were missing from the churches in

our region. It seemed that young people went to church with their

parents but upon graduation from high school often dropped out

of church altogether, with some returning once they were older,

married, and had children. The Holy Spirit burdened me to start a

church for the people who had fallen into that dropout hole. Over

the years, the statistics have further verified the need for this focus.

George Barna says, “Many twentysomethings are reversing course

after having been active church attenders during their teenage

years. As teenagers, more than half attended church each week and

more than 4 out of 5 (81%) had ever gone to a Chris tian church.

That means that from high school graduation to age 25 there is a

42% drop in weekly church attendance and a 58% decline from age

18 to age 29. That represents about 8,000,000 twentysomethings

alive today who were active church-goers as teenagers but who will

no longer be active in a church by their 30th birthday. ”3

Today, though we are thankfully seeing an increase in older

people, the average age at Mars Hill remains in the midtwenties.

Through painful trial and error, we have been able to motivate

and mobilize younger people for ministry. This is highly unusual.

According to Barna, “The research, conducted with 2,660 twentysomethings, shows that Americans in their twenties are significantly

less likely than any other age group to attend church ser vices, to

donate to churches, to be absolutely committed to Chris tian ity, to

read the Bible, or to serve as a volunteer or lay leader in churches. ” 4

Barna also says, “Perhaps the most striking reality of twentysomething’s faith is their relative absence from Chris tian churches. Only

three out of ten twentysomethings (31%) attend church in a typical week, compared to four out of ten of those in their 30s (42%)

and nearly half of all adults age 40 and older (49%). The research

shows that church attendance bottoms out during the late 20s when

the vast majority of students have transitioned from education to the

workforce. Just 22% of those ages 25 to 29 attended church in the

last week. ”5

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 10

02/03/06 11:44:14 AM

Prelude • 11

An additional oddity is that although we presently average more

than two weddings a week, the majority of those at our church are

single, since the tendency is to get saved while single and then get

married as Chris tians. In comparison, most churches our size have

less than 20 percent singles.6 According to Barna, “Married people

are more likely than singles to attend church in a typical weekend:

53% versus 37% respectively. ”7

Though Mars Hill is peculiar, I do believe it is like one of the

doves Noah sent out of the ark to look for land. The Chris tian church

has a new world of ministry opportunity to explore, among cities,

young people, and cultural progressives. At one time, cultural trends

primarily started on the East and West coasts (e.g., New York and Los

Angeles) and then spread toward the center of the country. But today

multiple cultural centers from which culture making emanates are

scattered in urban centers throughout the country.8 These cultural

centers are marked by such things as airports that provide mobility,

vital arts communities, tech-friendly lifestyles, colleges and universities, and blue politics (Democrats).

The urban tribes of culture making and trend setting attract the

same people our church attracts, namely, the young, single, educated,

creative, and liberal. According to William Frey, between 1995 and

2000, young people ages twenty-five to thirty-four migrated into

these cultural centers in the following order:

Atlanta, Georgia

Dallas, Texas

Phoenix, Arizona

Denver, Colorado

Las Vegas, Nevada

Charlotte, North Carolina

Portland, Oregon

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Washington, D.C.

and my city, Seattle, Washington9

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 11

02/03/06 11:44:14 AM

12 • Confessions of a Reformission Rev.

Conversely, the following ten cities saw the largest number of

young people ages twenty-five to thirty-four leave, taking with them

valuable human capital and future opportunity for those cities:

Los Angeles, California

Virginia Beach, Virginia

New York, New York

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Miami, Florida

Buffalo, New York

Honolulu, Hawaii

Boston, Massachusetts

San Diego, California

Nassau, New York10

Because the magnet cities for culture makers draw some of the

best and brightest young people in large numbers (e.g., Seattle

gained 27,201 twenty-five-to thirty-four-year-olds between 1995

and 2000), they are increasingly becoming states unto themselves

and creating the trends in the regions surrounding them.11 Therefore, to best prepare for the next wave of ministry opportunity, it

is important for Chris tians to learn from the Noah’s-dove churches

that are already exploring these new opportunities. God is using

young leaders to plant churches in these strategic culture-making

urban centers, which often grow into megachurches as they learn to

effectively reach the emerging culture. Along with Mars Hill, this

would include North Point Community Church (Andy Stanley)

outside of Atlanta (www.northpoint.org), Fellowship Bible Church

(Ed Young Jr.) in Dallas (www.fellowshipchurch.com), Village

Baptist Church (Matt Chandler) in Dallas (www.thevillagechurch.

net), The Fellowship Church (Ted Baird) near Phoenix (www

.fellowshipanthem.org), Central Chris tian Church (Jud Wilhite) in

Las Vegas (www.centralchristian.com), Imago Dei Church (Rick

McKinley) in Portland (www.imagodeicommunity.com), and Covenant Life Church (Joshua Harris) outside of Washington, D.C.

(www.covlife.org).

The following chapters recount our painful efforts to plant an

emerging church to reach emerging cultures in Seattle. My hope

is that our hardships and lessons will help to serve others who are

undertaking similar missions and inspire the planting and renewing of many churches to reach emerging cultures.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 12

02/03/06 11:44:14 AM

I was not a Christian when

I came to the church.

Today I am a pastor.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 13

02/03/06 11:44:15 AM

Ten Curious

Questions

This book is about the hard lessons we have learned at Mars Hill

Church in Seattle (www.marshillchurch.org). Writing this book

caused me to reflect on our past and subsequently conjured up a

horrendous feeling eerily similar to seeing my high school yearbook

photo in which I sported a soccer-rocker mullet. Like me, most

people prefer not to dwell on past moments of folly, embarrassment,

or failure. But the providential hand of a gracious God commonly

uses exactly such occasions to shape ministers and their ministries.

At each step of the crazy journey God has had us on, we have made

mistakes that should have killed us. But God has continually saved

us from ourselves and, like the perfect Father that he is, has taught

us important lessons.

Before we get started, I want to ask you a handful of questions

that I continually ask myself to ensure that our church remains

faithful to Jesus and his mission in our city. These questions will

help provide us a common jargon for understanding one another.

They are intended to help clarify your church’s identity, gospel,

mission, size, and priorities.

Question 1

Will your Rev. require reformission?

In my previous book, The Radical Reformission: Reaching Out

without Selling Out, I explained the growing reformation of what

it means to be a Chris tian missionary.1 Missions once solely meant

sending American Chris tians into foreign lands and cultures to live

among the people there and to bring the gospel of Jesus Christ to

14

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 14

02/03/06 11:44:18 AM

Ten Curious Questions • 15

them in a relevant way. But reformission also seeks to determine

how Chris tians and their churches can most effectively be missionaries to their own local cultures.

Reformission, therefore, begins with a simple return to Jesus,

who, by grace saves us and sends us into reformission. Jesus has

called us to (1) the gospel (loving our Lord), (2) the culture (loving our neighbor), and (3) the church (loving our Chris tian brothers and sisters). One of the causes for the lack of reformission in

the American church is that various Chris tian traditions are prone

to faithfulness on only one or two of these counts. Consequently,

when we fail to love the Lord, our culture, and our church simultaneously, reformation ceases, leaving one of three holes: the parachurch, liberalism, and fundamentalism.

Gospel + Culture – Church = Parachurch

First, some people become so frustrated with the church that

they bring the gospel into culture without it. This is referred to as

the parachurch and includes evangelistic ministries such as Young

Life and Campus Crusade for Christ. The parachurch has a propensity to love the Lord and love its neighbors but not to love the

church.

Culture + Church – Gospel = Liberalism

Second, some churches are so concerned with being culturally relevant that, though they are deeply involved in the culture,

they neglect the gospel. This is classic liberal Chris tian ity. Liberal

Chris tians run the risk of loving their neighbors and their Christian brothers and sisters at the expense of loving their Lord and his

gospel.

Church + Gospel – Culture = Fundamentalism

Third, some churches are more into their church and its traditions, buildings, and politics than they are the gospel. Though they

know the gospel theologically, they rarely take it out of their church.

This is classic fundamentalist Chris tian ity, which flourishes most

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 15

02/03/06 11:44:18 AM

16 • Confessions of a Reformission Rev.

widely in more independent-minded, Bible-believing churches.

Fundamental Chris tians are prone to love their Lord and their

brothers and sisters but not their neighbors.

The only way out of these holes is repentance, which enables

reformission. Through repentance, Chris tians and churches are

empowered by the Holy Spirit to simultaneously love the Lord, love

their neighbors, and love their Chris tian brothers and sisters.

Gospel + Culture + Church = Reformission

Reformission combines the best aspects of each of these types

of Chris tian ity: living in the tension of being culturally liberal yet

theologically conservative Chris tians and churches who are absolutely driven by the gospel of grace to love their Lord, their neighbors, and their fellow Chris tians. This book is a painfully honest

chronological account of our church’s reformission and how it

caused us to grow from 0 to 4,000 people in eight years.

Question 2

Will your church be traditional and institutional, contemporary and

evangelical, or emerging and missional?

For the past one thousand years, the Western church has enjoyed

a privileged position in the center of culture, during what was

known as Christendom. Because of this, the church also provided

a common moral framework and language for our nation. Simple

examples would include the frequent biblical allusions in the writings of our founding fathers and, more recently, the deeply biblical

imagery in the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr.

During the era of Christendom, it was generally believed that

our national culture was Chris tian, or at least Judeo-Chris tian.

Consequently, it was the job of the church to make converts for

the nation by challenging people to commit themselves to Jesus

and live morally. The upside of Christendom was that many people

did attend church. The downside was that the church in large part

became the servant of morality and the national good. The result

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 16

02/03/06 11:44:18 AM

Ten Curious Questions • 17

was a mean-spirited hypocrisy among “Chris tians” who wrongly

believed morality and redemption were synonymous and lived lives

more dominated by the American values of pride and selfishness

than by the gospel virtues of humility and selflessness. Also, Christendom churches defined themselves in contrast to other competing

churches, which often led to unnecessary hostility between Christian traditions that were distinct but not altogether different.

The era of Christendom was dominated by the traditional and

institutional church, which is marked by the following traits:2

• Missions is solely funding Americans to evangelize in foreign

countries.

• Culture is where the church expects to occupy a privileged

position of influence.

• The primary culture to reach is modern.

• Theology is liberalism or fundamentalism, with fighting

between the two sides.

• Churches exist largely to meet the needs of church members.

• Churches grow through births and attracting people with

denominational loyalties.

• Community means the church is a subculture that is closed

to outsiders.

• Pastors are selected and trained in seminaries, outside of the

local church.

• Pastors are servants and teachers who do most of the church

ministry, especially evangelization of the lost.

• Lost people are not frequently pursued for evangelistic

relationships.

• Faith is private and personal.

• Worship ser vices are based on tradition (e.g., robes, hymnals,

organs, liturgy).

• Church buildings are considered sacred places (e.g., crosses,

stained glass, icons) where people are to dress and act

formally.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 17

02/03/06 11:44:18 AM

18 • Confessions of a Reformission Rev.

As the era of Christendom began to wind down, it became apparent that two things were needed. First, the dwindling remnant of

Christendom included many people who attended church but did

not know Jesus and needed to be saved. Second, the growing babyboom generation was less likely to attend church and less attracted

by tradition or the denominational heritage than their parents had

been. The result was the birth of a new form of church, the contemporary and evangelical church, which sought to evangelize the

unsaved in the church and to bring other unsaved to the church to

be evangelized. Today, the traditional and institutional church is

hemorrhaging to death. In 1906, 40 percent of all Sunday worshipers were in mainline denominations.3 By 1999, that number had

fallen to only 16 percent of all worshipers because less people were

attending church and those who did were choosing the newer form

of church.4

The end of Christendom and the transition to a post-Chris tian

culture is currently dominated by the contemporary and evangelical

church, which is marked by the following common traits:

• Missions is a church department that sends people and

money to foreign countries.

• Culture is where the church battles to regain a lost position

of privileged influence.

• The primary culture to reach was modern and is

transitioning to postmodern.

• Theology is conservative and is built on a modernistic view

of truth and knowledge.

• Churches exist to meet the felt needs of spiritual consumers.

• Churches grow through marketing that brings people to

church events.

• Community means the church is a safe subculture that

welcomes lost people into the church.

• Pastors need not have formal theological training or

ordination.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 18

02/03/06 11:44:18 AM

Ten Curious Questions • 19

• Pastors are CEOs who lead and manage their staff, which is

responsible for ministry.

• Lost people are invited to evangelistic church programs that

target seekers.

• Faith is private and personal but is openly shown at church.

• Worship ser vices are based on styles from the 1980s and

1990s (acoustic guitars, drama, etc.).

• Church buildings are functional places (e.g., no crosses,

no stained glass, no icons) where people can dress and act

informally.

With Christendom essentially winding down now in the United

States and officially over in Europe, the traditional and institutional

church is dying as its market share dries up, and the contemporary

and evangelical church is scrambling to adjust to emerging postmodern cultures and generations. A third incarnation of the church

is arising, the emerging and missional church, which is marked by the

following traits:

• Missions is every Chris tian being a missionary to their local

culture.

• The church accepts that it is marginalized in culture and

holds no privileged position of influence but gains influence

by serving the common good.

• The primary culture to reach is postmodern and pluralistic.

• Theology ranges from ancient orthodoxy to heterodox

liberalism built on postmodern denials of true truth and

known knowledge.

• Churches are the people who love Jesus and serve his mission

in a local culture.

• Churches grow as Chris tians bring Jesus to lost people

through hospitality.

• Community means the church is a counterculture with a new

kingdom way of life through Jesus.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 19

02/03/06 11:44:19 AM

20 • Confessions of a Reformission Rev.

• Pastors need not be ordained or formally educated in

theology and are trained in the church.

• Pastors are missiologists who train Chris tians to be effective

missionaries.

• Lost people are saved by the Holy Spirit when and how he

determines.

• Faith is lived publicly together as the church and includes all

of life.

• Worship ser vices blend ancient forms and current local

cultural styles.

• Church buildings are sacred, as is all of God’s creation.

Because the declining, dominant, and emerging church types

each work from a different set of assumptions, it is incredibly important that churches and church leaders determine which church

form they will adopt. And to answer this question, they must carefully consider what the people in their local culture are like. For

example, a church ministering to modern-thinking retirees would

likely have better success with a traditional and institutional church.

This explains why Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, with a traditional liturgy, a robed choir, a pipe organ, and the classic oration

of preacher Dr. James Kennedy, is flourishing among retirees in

Florida. Conversely, a church ministering to suburban baby boomers would likely have better success with a contemporary and evangelical church, such as Willow Creek or Saddleback, and a pastor

like Rick Warren or Bill Hybels. And a church ministering to spiritual young creative types would likely have better success with an

emerging and missional church and pastor.

This book is about our church, Mars Hill, which is an emerging and missional church because that is the most effective church

form for reaching the city of Seattle, to which God has called us. I

believe that the emerging and missional church will eventually displace the contemporary and evangelical church in much the same

way that it displaced the traditional and institutional church. But

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 20

02/03/06 11:44:19 AM

Ten Curious Questions • 21

as long as there are varying cultures of people, there will be multiple church forms.

The point is not that one of these church forms is good and the

others are bad. Rather, one is likely more effective for reaching the

people in your local culture than the other forms are. Therefore,

those using one church form need not critique the other forms as

long as all are faithful to the functions mandated for the church in

Scripture.

To be effective, churches and their leaders must first evaluate

what type of church they presently are. Churches must also evaluate what their culture will look like in the future and how their

church can best prepare to reach that emerging culture. They must

then become the church that their future culture will need, if they

are not already.

Question 3

Will your church be an emergent liberal church or an emerging

evangelical church?

I was part of what is now known as the Emerging Church Movement in its early days and spent a few years traveling the country

to speak to emerging leaders in an effort to help build a missional

movement in the United States. The wonderful upside of the emerging church is that it elevates mission in American culture to a high

priority, which is a need so urgent that its importance can hardly

be overstated.

I had to distance myself, however, from one of many streams

in the emerging church because of theological differences. Since

the late 1990s, this stream has become known as Emergent. The

emergent church is part of the Emerging Church Movement but

does not embrace the dominant ideology of the movement. Rather,

the emergent church is the latest version of liberalism. The only

difference is that the old liberalism accommodated modernity and

the new liberalism accommodates postmodernity.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 21

02/03/06 11:44:19 AM

22 • Confessions of a Reformission Rev.

During dinner one evening with a friend, Dan Kimball, who

wrote The Emerging Church, I was struck by his distinction between

the emergent church and the emerging church.5 There has been

much confusion on this matter, partly due to the similarity in names.

The emerging church is a growing, loosely connected movement of

primarily young pastors who are glad to see the end of modernity

and are seeking to function as missionaries who bring the gospel

of Jesus Christ to emerging and postmodern cultures. The emerging church welcomes the tension of holding in one closed hand

the unchanging truth of evangelical Chris tian theology ( Jude 3)

and holding in one open hand the many cultural ways of showing

and speaking Chris tian truth as a missionary to America (1 Cor.

9:19 – 23). Since the movement, if it can be called that, is young and

is still defining its theological center, I do not want to portray the

movement as ideologically unified because I myself swim in the

theologically conservative stream of the emerging church.

I am particularly concerned, however, with some growing trends

among some people: the rejection of Jesus’ death on the cross as

a penal substitute for our sins;6 resistance to openly denouncing

homosexual acts as sinful;7 the questioning of a literal eternal torment in hell, which is a denial that holds up only until, in an ironic

bummer, you die and find yourself in hell;8 the rejection of God’s

sovereignty over and knowledge of the future, as if God were a

junior-college professor who knows only bits and pieces of trivia;9

the rejection of biblically defined gender roles, thereby contributing to the “mantropy” epidemic among young guys now fretting

over the best kind of looffah for their skin type and the number of

women in the military dying to save their Bed, Bath and Beyond

from terrorist attacks;10 and the rejection of biblical names for God,

such as Father, which is essentially apologizing before the unbelieving world for the prayer life of the flamboyantly heterosexual Jesus,

who uttered the horrendously politically incorrect “Our Father”

without ever having the decency to apologize for being a misogynist

patriarchal meanie.11 This is ultimately all the result of a diminished

respect for the perfection, authority, and clarity of Scripture, all of

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 22

02/03/06 11:44:19 AM

Ten Curious Questions • 23

which was written by patriarchal men. After all, how in the world

can we possibly know what anything means after we have a college

degree? 12 Come to think of it, I’m not even sure what I mean when

I say that I’m not sure what Scripture means — know what I mean?

For some Emergent leaders, this critique may be as welcome

as water on a cat. But I assure you that I speak as one within the

Emerging Church Movement who has great love and appreciation

for Chris tian leaders with theological convictions much different

from my own. And because the movement has defined itself as a

conversation, I would hope there would be room in the conversation

for those who disagree, even poke a bit of fun, but earnestly desire

to learn from and journey with those also striving to be faithful to

God and fruitful in emerging cultures. Standing with my brothers

and sisters in our great mission, I hope this book can in some small

way help the greater church emerge in biblical faithfulness and missional fruitfulness.

Therefore, it is very important that any church seeking to be

emerging define whether it is an emerging evangelical church or an

emergent liberal church. Our church is emerging and missional in

its practice and evangelical and biblical in its theology.

Question 4

Will you proclaim a gospel of forgiveness, fulfillment, or freedom?

Traditional, contemporary, and emerging churches also differ

in how they present the gospel. The traditional church generally

proclaims a gospel of forgiveness. According to the gospel of forgiveness, we have sinned against God and are under his wrath until

we ask for his forgiveness and live changed lives of repentance. This

gospel worked for people in Christendom because they had a general knowledge of authority, sin, judgment, hell, and Jesus.

Though this gospel made sense to most people at one time, this

sort of gospel seems judgmental, mean-spirited, naive, and narrowminded to the ever-growing number of people who do not understand the basic tenets of Chris tian ity. Such people do not appreciate

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 23

02/03/06 11:44:19 AM

24 • Confessions of a Reformission Rev.

being pushed to make an immediate decision to reject sin and accept

Jesus because they don’t know what sin is or who Jesus is until we

have taken the time to inform their understanding, which may take

months or years in a friendship.

The contemporary church generally proclaims a gospel of fulfillment. This gospel is influenced by the non-Chris tian psychologist Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs.13 His point is that

people move from basic survival needs to higher needs of actualizing their full potential to be and do all that they desire. The problem with Maslow’s theory is simple but significant. He establishes

each individual human being as their own god, on their own mission, pursuing their own glory. In this framework, I do not exist for

God but rather God exists for me. For example, if the Lord’s Prayer

were rewritten according to Maslow’s priorities, it would read “My

kingdom come, my will be done, for mine is the kingdom, power,

and glory.”

The contemporary church’s gospel of fulfillment essentially

accepts Maslow’s faulty hierarchy and teaches that God exists to

enable each of us to actualize our full potential. So in this therapeutic gospel, you use Jesus to achieve your ends, which can vary from

health to wealth to emotional contentment, or whatever personal

vision you have for your own glory.14 What hinders the fulfillment

of our full potential is not that we are sinners but rather that we

don’t love ourselves enough and don’t have enough self-esteem and

positive thinking. God exists to worship us, by telling us how loveable we are and how valuable we are. In this gospel, the cross is an

echo of my own great worth, since God found me so loveable and so

valuable that he was willing to die for me so that I could love myself,

believe in myself, and achieve my full glory.

The therapeutic gospel is a false gospel and an enemy of mission for many reasons. First, it does not call me to love God and my

neighbor, but instead only to love myself. Second, it does not call

me to God’s mission but rather calls God to my mission. Third, it

does not call me to be part of the church to serve God’s mission,

but instead to use the church to make me a better person. Fourth,

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 24

02/03/06 11:44:20 AM

Ten Curious Questions • 25

it does not call me to use my spiritual gift(s) to build up the church

but rather to actualize my full potential. Fifth, it takes pride, which

Augustine called the mother of all sins, and repackages it as selfesteem, the maidservant of all virtue.

The emerging church proclaims a gospel of freedom. According to the gospel of freedom, we were made to live in community

with God and with each other without the pains of sin and death.

But because of our sin, we have wrecked God’s good creation and

brought death and havoc into all of life. And though we are selfdestructive, God in his loving-kindness has chosen to save us from

ourselves. Our God, Jesus, came to live without sin as our example,

die for our sin as our substitute, and rise from death as our Lord

who liberates us from Satan, sin, and death.

The gospel of freedom says that only through Jesus can we be

brought back into friendship with God and with each other, because

he takes away the sin that separates us. And only through Jesus can

we be brought back into his original intentions for us: worshiping

God instead of ourselves, serving the common good, making culture, and through his grace, helping to right what has been made

wrong through sin. The Bible is replete with the gospel of freedom,

beginning with Moses. Perhaps the most obvious example is found

in the story of the Exodus, from which Paul adopts his understanding of redemption to mean being freed by God from slavery to

evil.

Question 5

Will your church be attractional, missional, or both?

The contemporary church growth movement and its evangelical seeker churches are attraction-based, meaning that the church

functions as a purveyor of religious goods and ser vices. Therefore,

the primary task of these churches is to bring people from the culture into the church to partake of programming that targets their

felt needs.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 25

02/03/06 11:44:20 AM

26 • Confessions of a Reformission Rev.

Conversely, emerging and missional churches see the church’s

primary task as sending Chris tians out of the church and into the

culture to serve as missionaries through relationships, rather than

bringing lost people into the church to be served by programming.

Pastors of emerging and missional churches routinely criticize the

attraction-based model as caring only about bringing more people

in to grow a bigger church. And pastors of attraction-based churches

commonly defend themselves by stating that their churches are

larger than most emerging and missional churches, which they say

proves that attraction-based churches are more effectively making

disciples as Jesus commanded.

The growing criticism between these camps is in large part

unnecessary, because they are working for the same goal — the

reaching of lost people for Jesus — but simply using different methods, methods that are complimentary, not contradictory. Consequently, churches must both bring people in and send people out

and must therefore structure themselves to achieve both objectives.

Additionally, we see both attractional and missional ministry methods in the life of Jesus Christ.

Jesus’ incarnation is in itself missional. God the Father sent God

the Son into culture on a mission to redeem the elect by the power

of God the Ghost. After his resurrection, Jesus also sent his disciples into culture, on a mission to proclaim the success of his mission, and commissioned all Chris tians to likewise be missionaries

to the cultures of the world (e.g., Matt. 28:18 – 20; John 20:21; Acts

1:7 – 8). Emerging and missional Chris tians have wonderfully rediscovered the significance of Jesus’ incarnational example of being a

missionary immersed in a culture.

But sadly, they are also prone to overlook the attractional nature

of Jesus’ earthly ministry.15 In addition to immersing himself in

a culture for a mission, Jesus’ ministry was also marked by the

large crowds that were drawn to him because of his preaching and

miracles.

One important example of the attractional elements of Jesus’

ministry is found in the sixth chapter of John’s gospel. A very large

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 26

02/03/06 11:44:20 AM

Ten Curious Questions • 27

crowd, numbering thousands of people, came to see Jesus perform

miracles and to hear him preach. Jesus appears to be modeling

attractional church growth strategies of doing what was needed

to gather many people to hear the preaching of the gospel. Jesus

then fed the entire crowd by miraculously multiplying a little boy’s

lunch, which would only have increased the crowds that thronged

to see him.

But Jesus then preached that he was the bread of life, which

drove many people away from him in confusion and disagreement.

We see that Jesus not only gathered a crowd but also intentionally

drove many people away because they were not among the elect

chosen for salvation ( John 6:37). Some disciples, however, remained

with Jesus and continued to be trained as missionaries by Jesus.

They were later sent out to follow his pattern of incarnating in a

culture, attracting crowds, preaching hard words that harden some

hearts and soften others, and then training those who believe to be

missionaries who follow Jesus’ principles of attractional and missional ministry.

Therefore, the growing hostility between attractional-ministry

pastors with larger churches and missional-ministry pastors with

smaller churches need not occur. Instead, each needs to learn from

the other; each has a vital piece of the truth gleaned from the life

of Jesus.

Attractional churches need to transform their

people from

being consumers in the church to being missionaries outside of the

church. Missional churches need to gather crowds to their church

so that hard words of repentance can be preached in an effort to

expose people’s hearts. Those whom God saves can then be trained

to go back out into the culture as missionaries to gather more people

to repeat the process. Simply, the goal of a church that is both missional and attractional is to continually follow Jesus’ example so

that more people are saved for God’s mission and more influence

is spread for God’s kingdom, without rejecting one aspect of Jesus’

ministry in favor of another.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 27

02/03/06 11:44:20 AM

28 • Confessions of a Reformission Rev.

Question 6

What size shoe will your church wear?

Churches, like children, have a shoe size that they will grow

into. As a church grows, it must accept its size. This can be difficult because people have different ideas of what constitutes “large”

and “small.” Additionally, people are prone to attach a moral value

to church size. This means that people who prefer a small church

will criticize a large church for being too slick and impersonal, and

people who prefer a big church will criticize a small church for not

experiencing enough conversion growth, diversity of people, or

quality of programming.

When it comes to church size, a few things are important to

remember. First, a church must determine what size they would like

to become and start acting like a church of that size if they hope to

achieve that goal. Second, a church must accept its size and not allow

people to demand that they receive the type of treatment they would

receive at a church of whatever size they prefer. An example of this

would be the expectation of some people in a large church that the

pastor be as accessible as the pastor of a smaller church. Third, for a

church to grow, it must also accept that the church will change. The

problem with most churches is not that they don’t want to experience conversion growth but rather that they do not want to change,

which negates their ability to grow and is a sin to be repented of.

Therefore, each church must ask how large they want to be and

prepare to work toward that goal. To help determine a reasonable

goal, it is helpful to see the various sizes of other churches. However, determining size categories for churches is very difficult. The

following is a rough estimate I came up with after reading some

books on the subject16 and interviewing John Vaughan of Church

Growth Today, who was particularly helpful. No one is exactly sure

how many Protestant churches there are in the United States, but

the general figures are somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 28

02/03/06 11:44:21 AM

Ten Curious Questions • 29

churches.17 So for purposes of a rough estimate, I am assuming

that there are 400,000 Protestant churches in the United States.

I am also assuming that the reported attendance at these churches

is accurate, which is highly questionable since the overreporting

of church attendance is estimated by some to be as high as 50 percent.18 Therefore, a rough estimate of weekly church attendance for

adults and children in America breaks down as follows:

Churches with 45 people or less

100,000 churches, 25% of all churches

Churches with 75 people or less

200,000 churches, 50% of all churches

Churches with 150 people or less

300,000 churches, 75% of all churches

Churches with 350 people or less

380,000 churches, 95% of all churches

Churches with 800 people or less

392,000 churches, 98% of all churches

Churches with 800 people or more

8,000 churches, 2% of all churches

Churches with 2,000 people or more

870 churches, 0.22% of all churches

Churches with 3,000 people or more

425 churches, 0.11% of all churches

Summarily, George Barna says, “Four out of ten church-going

adults (41%) go to churches with 100 or fewer adults while about one

out of eight church-going adults (12%) can be found in churches of

1000 or more adults. ”19

According to church expert Lyle Schaller, the two most comfortable church sizes are 45 people or less and 150 people or less.20

Consequently, these are likely also the hardest size barriers a pastor

has to push through. Practically, it seems that churches of 45 people

or less are large enough to gather for worship and function as a

church but small enough for everyone to know each other and have

a say in everything that happens. A congregation of 150 or less can

usually gather in one ser vice and exist as one community, yet have

the resources to hire a pastor to care for all the people. These factors may help explain why the average church in America is reportedly 89 people.21

Pushing through the 350 barrier can also be very difficult,

because it usually requires that the church transition to multiple

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 29

02/03/06 11:44:21 AM

30 • Confessions of a Reformission Rev.

pastors, multiple ser vices, and multiple communities. The following chapters will speak very practically of how we navigated through

each of these seasons, from being a church of under 45 people to

being a church of over 4,000 people. I acknowledge that some readers may be turned off by my focus on numbers, even though we

have a book of the Bible titled the same word. But every number is a

person, so numbers do matter because people matter.

A megachurch is technically 2,000 or more adults and children

in weekly worship.22 The first modern megachurch was led by my

favorite Chris tian outside of the Bible, Charles Haddon Spurgeon,

whose church grew to more than 5,000 people in London in the

late nineteenth century.23 Perhaps the first megachurch in America

was led by the aberrant theologian Charles Finney, who preached

to between 2,000 and 3,000 people each week at Chatham Street

Chapel in New York City in the late nineteenth century.24 In 1970,

there were only 10 non-Catholic megachurches in the United

States.25 Today there are more than 1,000 U. S. megachurches, and

a new church breaks the 2,000-attendance threshold every 2 days,

according to megachurch expert John Vaughan.26

But emerging and missional churches will include more megachurches than ever, and they will be both attractional and missional

in their philosophy of ministry. If a church is truly missional, it

may become a megachurch for three reasons: (1) the power of the

gospel of Jesus Christ is powerful and effective, (2) a truly outwardfocused missional church will experience conversion growth, and

(3) a truly missional church has such a burning desire for cultural

transformation that it must grow large enough to serve a whole city.

Mars Hill is one of the first emerging and missional megachurches

in the country to target postmodern culture.

Schaller notes that most people born after 1965 are used to functioning in much larger institutions (e.g., schools, grocery stores,

hardware stores).27 Therefore, younger people generally feel at home

in larger churches, which partially explains the popularity of megachurches and the willingness of younger people to drive greater distances to attend a megachurch.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 30

02/03/06 11:44:21 AM

Ten Curious Questions • 31

Schaller’s teaching and our experience at Mars Hill confirms

that emerging generations indeed feel more comfortable in larger

churches. This information runs contrary to much of the popular

teaching today, which asserts that the future of the church will be

house churches and smaller church communities. I believe that the

megachurch phenomenon is not over but rather just beginning, that

the “experts” are simply wrong, and that the future trend will be

toward the extremes of very small and very large churches.

Nothing is wrong with a small church, providing it hates sin,

loves Jesus, serves people, obeys Scripture, and sees transformed

lives. However, I find the conversation among numerous young

pastors who prefer smaller churches to be theologically troubling.

The governing assumption is that the early church, described in

Acts, was not a megachurch with systems and structures but simply

small groups of Chris tians hanging out informally in one another’s

homes.

This position was reinforced in a conversation I had with Michael

Frost and Alan Hirsch, who wrote the popular and insightful book

The Shaping of Things to Come.28 During a lecture they gave in the

Seattle area, they stressed this point and referenced the account of

Acts 2:42 – 47, in which the early church is described as small, disorganized, and meeting informally in homes. But what they failed

to also note is that in those same verses, the early church did meet

in a larger gathering in the temple courts. And in Acts 2:41, God

added three thousand converts in one day, making the early church

an immediate megachurch. Curiously, this was accomplished by a

good sermon about Jesus — the very thing that many young pastors

decry as a modern act, when it is in fact simply biblical.

Additionally, church history confirms that from its earliest days,

Chris tian ity was marked by megachurches. As early as AD 323,

church buildings were reportedly constructed that could accommodate upwards of 10,000 to 20,000 Chris tian worshipers at a time.29

Therefore, the existence of larger churches is not a modern phenomenon but is in fact something God has been doing since the

days of Pentecost.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 31

02/03/06 11:44:21 AM

32 • Confessions of a Reformission Rev.

In 1980, the largest church in America was 13,000 people, and

in 2003, the largest church was 25,000 people.30 While a church of

25,000 people may seem very large to many, size is indeed relative

when you consider the world’s largest church, Yoido Full Gospel

Church, in Seoul, Korea, which has 763,000 church members.31

Therefore, each church must ask how large they expect to be and

labor toward seeing enough conversions to achieve that goal. In setting this goal, a church must be realistic, since not every church

can or should be a megachurch. A church should also not seek to

limit its conversion growth simply because they wrongly believe

that smaller churches are closer to the early church model.

Question 7

Will your church have a mission of community or be a community

of mission?

The buzzword community is so often bantered about that it is

nearly devoid of meaning. But since the church is a community, it

is important to define what kind of community the church should

be. Without a clear definition of what a missional church community is and does, tragically, community will become the mission of

the church. Consequently, the goal of people will be to hang out

together in love, like the family they never had. While this is not

evil, it is also not sufficient.

If taken too far, this can lead to the heresy of participatory

redemption, in which the goal is to have authentic friendships and a

loving community instead of repentance and personal faith in Jesus

Christ as the means of salvation. This error is a very real threat that

is overlooked by many young Chris tian leaders I meet who prefer

smaller and more loosely defined neo-church arrangements and socalled new monastic communities, in which being in community

sometimes takes priority over being in Christ.

In Scripture, we see two prototypical communities: Babel/Babylon and Pentecost. Their similarities and differences are noted

below.32

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 32

02/03/06 11:44:21 AM

Ten Curious Questions • 33

Babel Community

Pentecost Community

A small city

A large kingdom

Built to house a few people

Built to house many people

Marked by walls

Marked by no walls

Intentionally resisted diversity

Intentionally pursued diversity

Avoided hospitality

Practiced hospitality

Gathered a homogenous people

Gathered a heterogeneous people

Made their name great

Made Jesus’ name great

God came down

God came down

God judged their sin

God forgave their sin

God confused their languages

God unified their languages

The Babylonian version of community is godless affinity. Babylonian community does not aspire to grow except by internal

births, does not welcome people who are different, does not practice

hospitality, and seeks to remain safe and successful. Community is

the only goal for churches who think Babylonian. God’s response

to Babylonian community is judgment and scattering, because it is

a sin, especially in the church.

The Pentecost version of community exists for mission, not for

itself. Pentecost community is not held together because people are

similar but rather because they are on the same mission with the

same Lord. Because of this, Pentecost community is marked by a

desire to expand God’s kingdom through the salvation of many

diverse people, who are hospitably welcomed to learn about the

greatness of Jesus. People who think with a Pentecost mindset do

not see the building of community in their church as their mission. Rather, they see their church community as existing solely for

God’s mission, and they accept that the only way to have healthy

community is to pursue God’s mission of reaching lost people

because community is an effect of mission but not an effective mission. God’s response to Pentecost missional community is grace

and unity through the Holy Spirit.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 33

02/03/06 11:44:22 AM

34 • Confessions of a Reformission Rev.

Question 8

Will your leaders work from guilt or conviction?

One of the greatest inhibitors of keeping a church on mission is

the erroneous spoken and unspoken expectations people have for

church leaders and their families. In a missional church, the lead

pastor is the architect who builds the ship more than he is the captain who pilots it, the cook who washes dishes in the galley, or the

activities director who coordinates the shuffleboard reservations.33

The role of architect is incredibly important because most pastors

have been trained how to work on a ship instead of how to build a

ship. Having a skilled captain, cook, and activities director is important but does not really matter if the ship can’t float, which means

that boat building is the most important job. Likewise, the pastor’s

highest task is to plan the building of a church that will float and to

allow everyone else to use their talents and gifts to accomplish the

overall mission God has for that church.

Most pastors, however, work in their boat and not on their boat

because often the Chris tians in a pastor’s church have mastered

the art of making him feel guilty and making their needs seem

urgent and important, when they rarely are.34 Therefore, leaders

of emerging and missional churches must work from the conviction that comes from God and his Word instead of from the guilt

that comes from people and their words. Leaders must frequently

decide between offending Christ or a Chris tian, and Ghost-guided

biblical conviction alone must determine the duties of church leaders. Otherwise, church leaders will waste their time washing dishes

while their church sinks.

Question 9

Do you have the guts to shoot your dogs?

Dogs are idiotic ideas, stinky styles, stupid systems, failed facilities, terrible technologies, loser leaders, and pathetic people. Most

churches know who and what their dogs are but simply lack the

courage to pull the trigger and shoot their dogs. Therefore, it is

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 34

02/03/06 11:44:22 AM

Ten Curious Questions • 35

vital to name with brutal candor the people, programs, structures,

and ministry philosophies that are dogs needing to be shot. Be sure

to make it count and shoot them only once so that they don’t come

back and bite you.35

Question 10

Can you wield a sword and a trowel?

In the days of Nehemiah, when the Israelites’ mission was to

rebuild the wall, Nehemiah had his people carry a trowel in one hand

to build and a sword in the other to defend their work. As we build

our churches in a culture no less hostile than that of Nehemiah, we

too must learn how to both build a missional church and defend it

from Satan, demons, and evildoers. In the following chapters, I will

be painfully honest about the shots from hell that nearly killed my

family and our church. In the next chapter, we’ll start our journey

in the hot upstairs youth room of a fundamentalist church.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 35

02/03/06 11:44:22 AM

36 • Confessions of a Reformission Rev.

Reformission Reflections

1. Do you personally tend toward liberalism, fundamentalism, or

reformission? Why?

2. Does your church or ministry tend toward liberalism,

fundamentalism, or reformission? Why?

3. Should your church or ministry be traditional, contemporary,

or missional? Why?

4. Is your church or ministry better at being attractional or

missional? How could improvements be made where it is weak?

5. How large is your church or ministry? How large should it be

in the next year, five years, and ten years?

6. Does your church or ministry community exist for the mission

of reaching lost people or primarily for itself?

7. Name at least ten dogs in your church or ministry that need to

be shot.

8. What does your church or ministry need to be defended from

to remain healthy? What can be done to defend it?

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 36

02/03/06 11:44:22 AM

I was not a Christian when

God saved me while I was

I came to the church.

living with my lesbian mom

and my dad was in

Today I am a pastor.

prison for murder.

I am a founding pastor.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 37

02/03/06 11:44:22 AM

Jesus, Our Offering Was

$137 and I Want to Use

It to Buy Bullets

0 – 45 People

The upstairs room at the fundamentalist church was so hot that

everyone was sweating like Mike Tyson in a spelling bee.1 During

one ser vice, a pregnant lady simply passed out and fell off her chair.

This would not have been so traumatic if I were trying to plant

one of those shake-and-bake, holy-roller churches where I smacked

people on the nugget in Jesus’ name so they could lie on the floor

and twitch like a freshly caught trout on a dock and call it the work

of the Holy Ghost.

It was the first half of 1996 and I was twenty-five years of age

chronologically, six years of age spiritually, and trying to gather

enough people to launch Mars Hill Church in the city of Seattle.

About ten to twenty people a week were showing up for our Sunday

ser vice, which had outgrown the living room of my rental home

and was now being held in one of those epically awful youth rooms,

complete with golden shag carpet on the floor and Chris tian rock

posters on the wall for the poor kids forced to ride the short bus of

Chris tian culture. Our weekly ser vice would start sometime around

6:00 p.m., whenever the college students and indie rockers would

show up, because it was apparently very difficult to get up by the

crack of dinner. Fortunately, the room was free, which was nearly

more than we could afford.

I had spent the previous two years as the college ministry intern

plankton at the bottom of the food chain at a multiracial mega38

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 38

02/03/06 11:44:25 AM

0 – 45 People • 39

church and had used the youth room to run a college group in Seattle. College ministry soon started to feel like hanging out with an

ex-girlfriend, so I hit the eject button because life-stage ministry

was a vocational dead end.

What my college students needed was to mentor high school

students and hang out with singles who had phased from college

into the work world and married couples who had learned what kind

of person to be and to marry to make a family work. What they

did not need was to hang out with the same immature yahoos they

spent all of their time playing “pull my finger” with anyway and

going to a free event that was like day care for twenty-one-year-old

hormonally enraged porn addicts and video-game aficionados trying to stretch junior high into the retirement years.

So I decided to start a church, for three reasons. First, I hated

going to church and wanted one I liked, so I thought I would just

start my own. Second, God had spoken to me in one of those weird

charismatic moments and told me to start a church. Third, I am

scared of God and try to do what he says.

My wife, Grace, and I did not yet have any children, were both

working jobs to make ends meet, and spent all our free time changing diapers on our baby church in its infancy phase.2 Our church

was a dysfunctional small group of Chris

tian college kids and

chain-smoking indie rockers who all shared the clueless look of a

wide-eyed basset hound that just heard a high-pitched whistle.

Infancy is the season of dreaming and envisioning the future, gathering

people, raising money, and making plans. The ministry at this stage exists

only in the mind of the leader, who seeks to effectively communicate the

vision and compel people to help make it a reality. In the infancy phase,

the church and the leader are one and the same because the leader is

essentially the only person holding the church together and doing most

of the work.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 39

02/03/06 11:44:26 AM

40 • Jesus, Our Offering Was $137 . . .

In retrospect, our church ser vices were, quite frankly, painful.

My preaching was like a combination of boring systematic theology

and uninspiring motivational talk from a cranky junior high gym

teacher. Our rotating cast of worship leader tryouts ranged from

screaming punk rockers — to this day, I have no idea why they were

so dramatically depressed — to the kind of happy-clappy Chris tian

praise musicians that you would expect to find playing on a karaoke

machine at a Chris tian homeschool co-op reunion for kids whose

moms made their clothes. Our sound system included speakers from

a home stereo that were muddy and faint, except when pumping out

feedback, of course, since we could not afford real speakers. We

used a moody overhead projector for worship that another church

had thrown out because it only worked when it felt like it. If I were

Hindu, I would guess that the projector was a junior high kid or a

union laborer in a former life.

In my imagination, however, I saw an entirely different church,

one that did not have a beat-up old couch or a foosball table in the

sanctuary. I envisioned a large church that hosted concerts for nonChris tian bands and fans on a phat sound system, embraced the

arts, trained young men to be godly husbands and fathers, planted

other churches, and led people to work with Jesus Christ as missionaries to our city.

Sadly, that church only existed in my mind, and the hard part

was figuring out how to get my vision into the minds of other

people so that together we could build the church God had put in

my imagination. I started to wrestle with some very basic questions

that, although I had read widely, I had apparently not connected in

a practical way for ministry. These questions continue to drive our

ministry so that it remains missional, and I believe they are vitally

important for every Chris tian and Chris tian leader to continually

ask because they keep the person and mission of Jesus as the most

important factor in the church and Chris tian life.3

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 40

02/03/06 11:44:27 AM

0 – 45 People • 41

The Missional Ministry Matrix

Priority 1: Christology — Who is Jesus, what has he accomplished, and

what has he sent us to do?

Since our little church was meeting in the evening, I spent a lot

of time visiting other churches in our area on Sunday mornings

to see how things were going, why they were succeeding or failing, and what kinds of people were going to various churches. I can

honestly say that visiting many churches was worse than being a

vegetarian chef employed at a steak house.

1. Christology

Who is Jesus, what has he

accomplished,

and

what

has

he sent us to do?

4. Ministry

How does Jesus want me

to help serve his mission

2. Ecclesiology

in our culture through

How does the Bible tell us

my

church?

to structure our church leadership

so that our church can most

effectively be God’s missionary

to our culture?

3. Missiology

How can we most effectively

expand God’s kingdom

where we are sent?

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 41

02/03/06 11:44:27 AM

42 • Jesus, Our Offering Was $137 . . .

What kept nagging me about each church I visited was that no

matter what the tradition or theological persuasion was, they generally had a crooked Christology. What I mean is this: in visiting

numerous churches scattered across the city and throughout the

surrounding suburbs, rarely did I hear a clear declaration of the

person of Jesus Christ. He was never presented as the eternal God

who incarnated as a man in culture to live without sin, die as a substitute for sinners, and resurrect in triumphant victory over Satan,

sin, and death; who is now exalted as King of Kings and Lord of

Lords; and who is coming again to judge the living and the dead,

sending the repentant to his heavenly kingdom and sentencing the

unrepentant to his fiery hell.

In the more mainline liberal churches, I heard about the halodiaper Christ. He was presented as little more than a marginalized

Galilean peasant who took a beating as an example for the little

guys of the world who get pushed around by bullies and cry a lot. In

the more mainstream evangelical churches, Jesus was presented as

a sort of buddy Christ, who was a motivational life coach who could

help you lose weight and make more money with his pithy acronyms

and cheerleader enthusiasm.

In both cases, Jesus was shown only in the selective partial portrait that best suited the agenda of the church, which ranged from

gay rights to environmentalism, financial prosperity, and emotional

euphoria, depending on the church. What I did not witness was

an understanding of exactly who Jesus was and is and what he had

accomplished through his incarnation, death, resurrection, and

exaltation.

It was not so much that the various churches were wrong per

se but that they were incomplete in their selective presentations

of Jesus. In the more modern churches, the triumph of the resurrected Jesus was stressed to emphasize victory, so that being a

Chris tian basically meant you were on the winning team with Jesus

and, therefore, you were a real winner. What they overlooked was

the incarnation of Jesus. Simply, they ignored the fact that Jesus

humbly entered into culture to identify with and effectively reach

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 42

02/03/06 11:44:27 AM

0 – 45 People • 43

lost people steeped in various kinds of sin. This oversight allowed

people to triumphantly parade their victory over sin and sinners but

failed to call them to humbly incarnate as missionaries in culture to

effectively reach lost people. Chris tians with this mindset can easily

come to see themselves as winners and lost people as losers and consequently are often despised by lost people, who find them smug.

Conversely, many other churches more akin to the so-called

postmodern churches focused almost exclusively on vegetablemunching hippie Christ’s humble incarnation in culture to hang

out with sinful lost people, particularly the poor and marginalized.

In this mindset, being a Chris tian means being a nice person who

loves people no matter what their lives are like by trying to identify

with their cultural experiences and perspectives in a nonjudgmental

and empathetic manner. What is lacking, however, is the understanding that when we next see Jesus, he will not appear as a humble, marginalized Galilean peasant. Rather, we will see the exalted,

tattooed King of Kings coming with fire blazing in his eyes and a

sword launching from his mouth, with which to make war upon

the unrepentant. Until the day of Jesus’ second coming, we are not

merely to relate to people but also to command them to repent of

sin and bend their knee to the King before they are grapes crushed

under his foot in the winepress of his fury.

We need both portraits, the humble, incarnated Christ and the

triumphant, exalted Christ, to truly understand Jesus Christ. As

we get to know the humble, incarnated Christ, we learn how to be

missional and lovingly relate to people in their culture. As we get

to know the glorified, exalted Christ, we learn to be confident and

bold because we proclaim his victory over Satan, sin, death, and

hell.

It took a lot of hours reading my Bible, especially the incarnational gospel of John and the exaltational Revelation of John, to

sort this out in my mind theologically. In the end, I realized that we

labor with the exalted Christ, which gives us authority to proclaim

the gospel of freedom. And we labor like the incarnated Christ,

which gives us humility and grace to creatively demonstrate and

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 43

02/03/06 11:44:27 AM

44 • Jesus, Our Offering Was $137 . . .

proclaim the love of Christ to fellow sinners in our culture. And

though I needed to be like Jesus and lead our people in kind, I also

needed to remember that there is one way in which a Chris tian

should not be like Jesus. Jesus never sinned and, therefore, never

repented, but because we sin, we must continually repent if we are

to be faithful missionaries. This simple point is important because,

while the many emerging pastors I speak with have rightly focused

on following the example of Jesus, if they fail to recognize this vital

difference between us and Jesus, they will diminish the acknowledgment of sin and the urgency of repentance.

The more I read the Bible, the more deeply the Holy Spirit convicted me that I had grievously erred by trying to figure out how

to do church successfully by reading a lot of books, visiting a lot

of churches, and copying whatever was working. Instead, I needed

to first wrestle with Jesus like Jacob wrestled with Jesus and then

discover what Jesus’ mission was for Seattle and repent of everything I thought and did that was not congruent with his mission for

our city. Only then could I faithfully lead our church to follow our

Senior Pastor, Jesus, on his mission in our culture, with the humility of his incarnation and the strength of his exaltation.

Priority 2: Ecclesiology — How does the Bible tell us to structure our

church leadership so that our church can most effectively be God’s

missionary to our culture?

Before God rebuked me, my primary mission was to get a lot

of people to show up on Sundays to listen to me preach. But once I

realized that the mission of the church was not simply to see how

many people would come to listen to my pithy insights, I saw that I

had to spread the workload so that we could scatter for mission and

not just gather for Mark.

Even though our church was no bigger than some Mormon families, it was wearing me out. Like most pastors of small churches, I

was doing a lot of deacon work. I would unlock the building, photocopy my sermon notes, help set up our cutting-edge Fisher Price

sound system, set up chairs, welcome visitors, hand out the ser0310270162_confess_rev.indd 44

02/03/06 11:44:28 AM

0 – 45 People • 45

mon notes, run the ser vice, and clean up the room when everyone

left. During the week, I would answer the phone, answer email, go

through the mail, and do whatever else needed to be done, including driving around frantically before the ser vice to pick people up.

Thankfully, a handful of faithful servants picked up the slack,

so the church was more than just one highly motivated young guy

without any real skills in management. I learned that in a small

church, ministry is generally something the pastor does for his

people and that the people chip in if and when they feel like it. I

feared that if this mindset remained in my church, it would either

fail to grow or grow and bury me in work for lazy and ungrateful

church people.

As our church continued to meet, it became clear that three

basic types of people were showing up. Observers were happy to do

and give nothing but just came to watch the show each week, not

unlike the people who hit the brakes when driving past a nasty car

wreck to gaze and grin. Consumers likewise gave and did nothing

but were always wanting more and making demands for more goods

and ser vices from me. Participants were the handful of people who

had bought into the idea of the church being a missionary to our

city. They came to church seeking a way to serve a greater mission

and were enormously encouraging.

I soon tried to spend most of my time with the participants in

our mission rather than with the observers or consumers of our

church. I continually repeated our mission each Sunday from the

pulpit — to honor God through the gospel as a church transforming

the city — so that the people who stayed in the church understood

that they were not welcome to bring any other agenda. The problem was that many of the people who came to the church had been

sucking the life out of various program-driven, seeker-sensitive

churches for years and ended up being basically worthless for mission. Week after week, they would walk in to see that we did not

have the program they wanted and then walk back out, never thinking that perhaps they should serve Christ and build a ministry.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 45

02/03/06 11:44:28 AM

46 • Jesus, Our Offering Was $137 . . .

The college kids and singles who had sucked resources from

youth groups and parachurch ministries for their entire life without serving or giving were generally just more dead weight to drag

around. The young arty types were more willing to serve, providing

it was something cool and up-front like playing worship music or

speaking to the group in eccentric bohemian fashion, which would

be tough to organize because if they all were on the stage, we’d have

no one else left to sit in the room and watch them be cool.

In retrospect, I made some very strategic errors that nearly killed

the progress of our church. First, I had a very informal leadership

structure, as is common in small churches, which permitted heretics, nutjobs, and pushy types to wield a lot of power. Worse still,

it was hard to know how to remove such people without killing the

church since it was so small that we were one social network and to

remove one person was to risk losing every person.

Second, the church was based on relationships that were all connected to me, and we did not have formal small groups to connect

people to each other. This kept me from working on growing the

church, and I got stuck being friends with the handful of people we

already had. This became particularly obvious when my truck and

I seemed to be moving every college student in the church each

school year.

Third, I had not clearly articulated in written form what we

would and would not fight over theologically, which led to some

tremendous problems and got us branded as a cult by some outsiders. I also did not explain in written form that we were theologically

conservative and culturally liberal, which caused great confusion

because half of the church was angry that the other half was smoking, while the other half was angry that I taught from the Bible.

Fourth, I greatly underestimated Solomon’s statement that

“money is the answer for everything” (Eccl. 10:19). Somehow I got

the idea that money was a dirty thing and that to talk about it,

receive it, or spend it was also dirty. To this day, I am not sure

where this silly idea came from, but I was willing to have both my

wife and I work full-time to pay the bills for our little church, to

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 46

02/03/06 11:44:28 AM

0 – 45 People • 47

the point that she began having stress-related health problems. I

raised outside support to cover part of a salary so that I could work

for the church for free and left a box in the back corner of the room

on Sundays, telling people that if God led them to give, they could.

Apparently, the Ghost only led people to give once every presidential election, and I hit rock bottom one Sunday when our offering

was $137. I stood alone in the room, counting the money and cussing at the offering box for being filled with one-dollar bills and the

ominous smell of imminent death. Obviously, I had to quickly figure out how to organize our church with real elders, real deacons,

and real Chris tians so that we could get to our mission of reaching

lost people.

At the time, it was becoming increasingly popular for young

pastors to have churches that were not called “churches” but rather

silly things like “new monastic communities” and leaders that were

not called “pastor” but rather silly things like “abbess” or “spiritual director.” As our mission began to develop, the New Testament teaching on church leadership and church discipline seemed

increasingly wise and urgent to implement, before we ended up like

the church at Corinth, divided and off mission because of folly and

sin. Over the years, I have become increasingly troubled by the frequency with which young pastors simply dismiss the New Testament teaching on church leadership and discipline, so that if four

guys are drinking beer in a pub, they can call it a church. One wellknown expert promoting this new undefined, undisciplined, and

unbiblical ecclesiology was once asked how we can possibly define

what a church is if his advice of not having elders, deacons, members, discipline, or doctrine was heeded. His response was simply,

“If it smells like a church, it is a church.” My response was that

sometimes a whore wears the same perfume as a wife, and it’s no

different with the bride of Christ.

God deeply burdened me to thoroughly study and submit to the

biblical teaching on church leadership. People’s eternal lives were

at stake, and I would one day stand before Jesus to give an account

for each person that he had entrusted to me to pastor, leaving no

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 47

02/03/06 11:44:28 AM

48 • Jesus, Our Offering Was $137 . . .

room for ecclesiological experimentation or for vainly creating new

definitions of church because I wanted to be cool (Heb. 13:17).4

Pastors who want to do mission need to first meet the New Testament requirements of an elder-pastor and then train other men

to be qualified pastors and men and women to be qualified deacons. Without biblical leadership, mission cannot happen because

no one has the authority to define the mission, direct the mission,

or defend the mission. This explains why church ecclesiology was

so important to Paul, who followed Jesus’ example of appointing

men to the highest positions of spiritual leadership. When biblical

church leadership is in place, people can be more effectively trained

for ministry that is meaningful because it is missional.

Priority 3: Missiology — How can we most effectively expand God’s

kingdom where we are sent?

While visiting the various church ser vices in proximity to our

church, it struck me as curious that although all the congregations

claimed to be Chris tian, they were clearly all on very different

missions. One church was particularly confusing. They promoted

homosexuality but made me take off my ball cap upon entering the

church. It seemed odd that a male greeter who had likely had sex

with a man before church chastised me for wearing a hat in church

because I was disrespecting God.

The woman pastor of this church, wearing a very nice, flowing,

cutting-edge-of-1536 robe, talked about rainbows for twenty minutes while sixty or so very old people who were former classmates of

Noah and eyewitnesses to the covenant rainbow sat scattered among

one thousand seats or so and napped in Jesus’ name. Between her

sermonette, the written literature I picked up that told me how to

bequeath my estate to the church when I die, and looking around

the room at the equivalent of a Viagra before-photo of lifeless geriatrics, I truly could not discern why that church existed. The closest

I came to finding someone with a mission was the children’s pastor,

namely the meek husband of the senior pastor in pumps, who said

his goal was to make his wife happy, which made me very sad.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 48

02/03/06 11:44:28 AM

0 – 45 People • 49

Down the street, another woman pastor and her gay male associate pastor with a lovely rainbow on his elegantly sassy robe both

spoke passionately about the need to get rid of our nuclear weapons.

Their message did not connect with me because I did not have any

nuclear weapons. So I left early.

At a church in the suburbs, I was impressed with their very cool

building but a bit bummed that the church web address was the

same as the pastor’s name, because it seemed a bit pretentious, like

rapper P Diddy a.k.a. Sean John, who wears his own clothing line

with his name emblazoned on the front of his shirt. Conversely,

I was also a little jealous because it did sound a bit cool to have

a church named after me, complete with my photo on the side of

buses so that everyone would know that I was pastor izzle fo’ shizzle.

From the printed material and the sermon, it was readily apparent

that this church was into the bling Christ, who will make you rich

and cure all your diseases, except for the epidemics of consumerism and eighties charismullet hair, of course. They even taught that

Jesus was a rich man and that only people who lack faith get sick,

presumably like the junior varsity Job and Paul. For them, Jesus was

a piñata, Chris tian ity was a whacking stick, and their mission was

to teach people how to get goodies to fall out of heaven.

One fundamentalist church I visited was doing a series on Revelation, and the pastor’s face was so red that I thought he was going

to blow a gasket. He yelled about the end of the world at the battle

of Armageddon, which was going to happen in ten or fifteen minutes, from what I could surmise. Unlike the pastor of the liberal

church, this dude was a full-blown, big-gutted, heterosexual, gunshooting, truck-driving, meat-eating, fire-and-brimstone-preaching Bible thumper from the old school. He was my favorite, even

though he used the King James Version and said homosexual like it

was three words, “ho-mo-sexual.”

His point was that Satan had taken over the media with the help

of the Jews and that some secret group of government leaders with a

really scary name like Illuminati were meeting behind closed doors

to usher in a one-world government. Presumably, it would be led

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 49

02/03/06 11:44:29 AM

50 • Jesus, Our Offering Was $137 . . .

by none other than the Antichrist, who would make us all get bar

codes on our heads so we could be scanned like jars of mayonnaise

at the grocery story and run through a wood chipper if we did not

pray to Satan and eat our children. Fortunately, the pastor told us

about the rapture and how, if we don’t watch television and do vote

Republican, we can fly to heaven just before Jesus opens a can of

whoop in the end. This man was on a mission, but it wasn’t very

missional. His mission seemed to be simply to get off the planet as

soon as possible, which didn’t sound very incarnational to me.

I visited a lot of other churches, but you get the point. No matter what the tradition or theological perspective, the one common

thread that wove all of the churches together was that they were

each on their own mission instead of on Jesus’ mission to transform people and cultures by the power of the Holy Spirit through

the work of the gospel. And each church conveniently grabbed the

snapshot of Jesus that best suited their mission and used it to legitimize and bless their mission in his name. Theologically, this was

profoundly troubling, because I was certain that Jesus was on his

own mission and that any church not on that mission had what Paul

called another gospel and another Jesus, concocted by a cunning

Serpent.

During this time, I was deeply convicted that until this point I

too had been on my own mission with my church, trying to reach

hip postmodern people and have hip music and basically just do the

cool church thing. I had grown facial hair, started cussing again (I

had stopped for about fifteen minutes after I got saved), and briefly

considered taking up smoking but had asthma, which kept me from

achieving my full cool potential. But I was certain that while Jesus

did not mind if hip postmoderns got saved or if our band was rockin’

like Dokken, he did have bigger things in mind when he got out of

his tomb on Easter Sunday than me growing facial hair, cussing,

and rocking out. This led me to consider the next question: What

exactly had Jesus assigned to our church as our part in his mission

in our city? To learn the answer, I obviously needed more time in

prayer and Scripture to listen to what God would say.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 50

02/03/06 11:44:29 AM

0 – 45 People • 51

Priority 4: Ministry — How does Jesus want me to help serve his mission

in our culture through my church?

I know this may sound nuts, but when you are the only pastor on

staff at a small church, you don’t have a boss, a job description, or a

general clue what you are supposed to be doing. In some ways, I felt

like the kid in that movie Home Alone.

Trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing, I met

with a few other pastors to inquire about their typical day. I learned

that small church pastors go out to lunch a lot, answer the phone,

counsel people, tidy up the church building, labor to put together

a mediocre sermon, and sit in their offices looking sacred so that if

people drop by, they feel like they are getting their money’s worth

from their pastor.

Since my office was in our home, we were borrowing the youth

room at the fundamentalist church on Sundays, and I did not like to

counsel people, I decided that I would just do what I believed Jesus

wanted of me after spending hours studying the epistles and praying for direction. I did not want to be an employee of the church,

keeping shop by working for church people, much like a hotel concierge sitting by a desk, waiting for the phone to ring so that customers can be well served no matter what their outrageous demands

are. Believing I worked for Jesus and not the church, I decided to

spend my time with Jesus, prayerfully investigating the city like a

missionary, trying to figure out what Jesus’ mission was for our city.

Over the years, I have accepted that I’m really not much of a pastor

but rather am a missiologist studying the city who leads a church

filled with missionaries who reach the city and with pastors who

care for the converts.

I tried to figure out why the different neighborhoods in our city

functioned as tribes that shared values and experiences. I hung out

on college campuses, observing students and asking them about

their spirituality, and killed time in various bars, coffee shops, and

restaurants, observing people to determine why they were drawn

to these places instead of to local churches. I met with people who

were shaping our culture, such as real estate brokers, chamber of

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 51

02/03/06 11:44:29 AM

52 • Jesus, Our Offering Was $137 . . .

commerce members, business leaders, musicians, and basically anyone who would talk to me. I also spent time hanging out with the

homeless kids who loitered near the university, trying to figure out

what their family systems had been like. This was a season of listening, since I was not actively trying to save anyone just yet but rather

trying first to understand them so that I could build a church best

suited to reach people like them and to change the culture that contributed to their problems.

But to make that happen, I had to focus all of my time and energy

on growing Mars Hill as a missional church for Seattle. Therefore,

I had to stop doing all other ministry work that was not accomplishing this objective. As you can imagine, this presented me with

difficult decisions. At the time, I was cohosting a national radio

show called Street Talk, founded by a dear friend named Lief Moi.

We spent Saturday nights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight answering

spiritual questions from the usual bag of mixed nuts listening to the

radio while driving home drunk.

The show itself was a bit of a miracle. We had no sponsors, no

real budget, and no paid staff. On a whim, Lief raised enough money

through one of those chicken-dinner fundraisers to get our local

show beamed up to a broadcast satellite. But no market in the country agreed to pick us up. One night we unexpectedly started getting

calls from the great nation of Texas because the board operator at

a radio station forgot to turn off the satellite feed. The listeners

liked the show enough to call the station and plead for our show to

remain on air, and that is how we got into our first national market. The miracles continued until we were on some thirty stations

across the country.

I really enjoyed the show because it was successful in bringing

the gospel to a wide audience and taught me a lot about the thoughts

and questions of lost people. I needed to quit the show at this point,

however, to focus on our struggling little church. Lief later shut the

radio show down altogether, though it was successful, to also focus

on our church. I also killed the small college ministry that I had

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 52

02/03/06 11:44:29 AM

0 – 45 People • 53

started, and most of those students scattered like chaff in the wind,

though a handful jumped on board to help start the church.

Speaking to other pastors, I learned that many pastors, particularly pastors of small churches, are busy but bored like I was. They

spend their time taking care of their people and running ser vices

but don’t have much of a mission to keep their pilot light lit. So

they tend to volunteer time in other ministries, such as overseas

missions trips, parachurch organizations, and the like, to do something more than just answer the phone and meet with the same

handful of people that already know Christ and drive the pastors

nuts. I was convicted that rather than spending my time supporting

auxiliary ministries outside of our church, I should labor to build a

church that would satisfy my ministry desires by being on mission

with Jesus to transform my city by the power of the gospel. To do

this, I would need to stay doggedly focused on our mission. Over

the years, this has become increasingly difficult because the other

pastors in our area, whom I do sincerely love, are prone to jump on

various bandwagons, from political causes to social agendas, and

want me to do the same. I refuse to join them not because they are

wrong but because their projects are off my God-given mission and,

therefore, are a waste of my time and energy, not unlike a hockey

player spending hours perfecting his curveball.

So in an effort to clarify our mission, I wrote down on paper the

first of what would eventually be many strategic plans. I shot for the

moon rather foolishly and decided that our church that was not big

enough to fill a bus would plant multiple churches, run a concert

venue, start a Bible institute, write books, host conferences, and

change the city for Jesus. I started handing out these goals printed

on boring white paper without any graphics, colors, or cool fonts,

naively assuming that it would all happen eventually because it was

what Jesus wanted.

To get leaders in place for world domination, I also spent time

trying to articulate the vision in my head to good men who would

be qualified to rise up as fellow elders-pastors. So, as Jesus did, I

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 53

02/03/06 11:44:29 AM

54 • Jesus, Our Offering Was $137 . . .

spent time in prayer asking the Father which of his sons should be

trained for leadership. The church started as an idea I shared with

Lief Moi and Mike Gunn. Lief is a descendant of Genghis Khan and

his dad was a murderer, and Mike is a former football player. They

proved to be invaluable, except for the occasional moments when

they would stand toe-to-toe in a leadership meeting, threatening to

beat the Holy Spirit out of each other. Both men were older than I

and had years of ministry experience, and they were good fathers,

loving husbands, and tough. Too often this last point is overlooked,

but when Paul said that a pastor must fight like a soldier, train like

an athlete, and work hard like a farmer, he had in mind the manliest

of men leading the church (2 Tim. 2:1 – 7). Sadly, the weakest men

are often drawn to ministry simply because it is an indoor job that

does not require heavy lifting.

To prepare the best men that I had to become pastors-elders, we

started meeting with Eric Brown, who is currently on staff at Imago

Dei Church in Portland (part of our Acts 29 Network), Campus

Crusade for Christ staff member Chris Knutzen, and a man named

Kirk Schlemlein. All of us were converted later in life, which was

helpful because we were focused on reaching lost people and could

relate to lost people. In time, this group became the official elder

council and ruled the church through some incredibly tough seasons. The key was that each man was a player who could do ministry and a coach who could train other leaders. Since we were flat

broke with no staff, I needed a team of player-coaches who could

get things done and lead the church through the sheer force of their

godly influence.

Our church was so small that I knew everyone by name and visitors stuck out like strangers at a family reunion. For reasons that

are still unclear to me, people started visiting our little neo-Amish,

punk-rock enclave, maybe just because it was new and there was a

buzz about a new kind of church. The good news was that I was the

pastor of a growing church. The bad news was that I was a bad pastor of a bad church and had a lot of mistakes to undo.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 54

02/03/06 11:44:29 AM

0 – 45 People • 55

Reformission Reflections

1. Does your church or ministry have a clear biblical

understanding of Jesus? If not, what else do your people need

to learn?

2. Is your church or ministry led by qualified and respected

leaders? What can you do to support the leaders in your

church?

3. Articulate in one sentence the mission Jesus has called your

church or ministry to. Would the people in your church or

ministry give the same answer, or are there contradictory

missions and confusion in your church or ministry? What can

be done to bring people who are not on mission in line with

the mission?

4. What ministry are you currently doing to help serve Jesus’

mission in your culture through your church? What are you

learning as you serve?

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 55

02/03/06 11:44:30 AM

031020755X_relation_fm.qxp 9/8/06 2:21 PM Page 1

This page is intentionally left blank

We were the fi rst

family at the church

and today our dad

is a pastor.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 57

02/03/06 11:44:30 AM

Jesus, If Anyone Else

Calls My House, I May Be

Seeing You Real Soon

45 – 75 People

As I held the knife in my hand, my chest puffed out in pride. I knew

in the depths of my soul that I had finally become a man. I can still

remember that life-changing day when I was asked to leave the kids’

table and told to sit instead at the adults’ table for Thanksgiving

dinner. Unlike the kids’ table, the adults’ table had cups without

lids, dangerous knives for cutting your own food, and a curious

absence of mashed potatoes being flicked between warring diners.

Likewise, I was proud when our childish church eventually

outgrew the stinky, hot upstairs youth room at the fundamentalist church. Subsequently, our mighty nation of some forty-five

assorted mixed nuts moved into the sanctuary of the church, which

felt like we had metaphorically left the kids’ table in favor of the

adults’ table.

It was the middle of 1996, and we continued meeting at 6:00

p.m. because we could not find a place to have ser vices on Sunday

mornings. Renting the sanctuary cost $1,000 a month, which was a

great deal of money at the time because we were struggling to just

get up to broke. I occasionally bought lottery tickets and promised

God I would tithe if he’d let me win, but to no avail. We decided to

go ahead and rent the sanctuary anyway because we wanted more

seats so that we could reach more people and had faith that God

would bring in the money because we were on his mission.

58

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 58

02/03/06 11:44:33 AM

45 – 75 People • 59

I was feeling a bit abused and disrespected by our church, not

unlike a babysitter for a legion of Rosemary’s babies. But one day,

totally out of the blue, a guy named Pete called me “Pastor,” something no one had ever done before. I felt like I was finally getting

some respect — until Pete laughed and punched me in the shoulder,

saying he was only kidding. I wanted to give him the metaphorical

right hand of fellowship but chose to just walk away. In retrospect,

this disrespect may also have had something to do with the fact that

I often preached in a ball cap and said “dude” and “bro” a lot.

The church office was still in our home, which was odd. I spent

my days getting up, getting dressed, and sitting in my living room

by myself, pretending to have office hours, which proved unproductive. Occasionally someone would call, but being a heterosexual

man who hates to talk on the phone, I soon got sick of answering it.

I also quickly learned that if I answered the phone, the same people

would call more frequently, and I did not really want to talk to them

because they were a lot like Bill Murray’s character in the movie

What about Bob?

This was drilled home for me one night when the church phone

in our house rang at some godforsaken hour when I’m not even a

Chris tian, like 3:00 a.m. I answered it in a stupor, and on the other

line was some college guy who was crying. I asked him what was

wrong, and he said it was an emergency and he really needed to

talk to me. Trying to muster up my inner pastor, I sat down and

tried to pretend I was concerned. I asked him what was wrong, and

he rambled for a while about nothing, which usually means that a

guy has sinned and is wasting time with dumb chitchat because he’s

ashamed to just get to the point and confess. So I interrupted him

blurting out, “It’s three a.m., so stop jerking me around. What have

you done?”

“I masturbated,” he said.

“That’s it?” I said.

“Yes,” he replied. “Tonight I watched a porno and I masturbated.”

“Is the porno over?” I asked.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 59

02/03/06 11:44:33 AM

60 • Jesus, If Anyone Else Calls . . .

“Yes,” he said.

“Was it a good porno?” I asked.

He did not reply.

“Well, you’ve already watched the whole porno and tugged your

tool, so what am I supposed to do?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “You are my pastor, so I thought that

maybe you could pray for me.”

To be honest, I did not want to pray, so I just said the first thing

that came to mind. “Jesus, thank you for not killing him for being a

pervert. Amen,” I prayed.

“Alright, well you should sleep good now, so go to bed and don’t

call me again tonight because I’m sleeping and you are making me

angry,” I said.

“Well, what I am supposed to do now?” he asked.

“You need to stop watching porno and crying like a baby afterward and grow up, man. I don’t have time to be your accountability

partner, so you need to be a man and nut up and take care of this

yourself. A naked lady is good to look at, so get a job, get a wife, ask

her to get naked, and look at her instead. Alright?” I said.

“Alright. Thanks, Pastor Mark,” he said as I hung up the phone

and walked back to bed shaking my head.

He actually called me “Pastor” and was not laughing like Pete

had, which was an encouraging first. You may think I’m a jerk of a

counselor, but I think deep down most other pastors think like I do

and just don’t say what they think because they lack whatever deep

psychological problem I have that prevents me from filtering my

words through a grid of propriety. The truth is that the guy actually did what I told him and today has a wife and some kids and no

longer watches porno.

The next day I sat alone in my house, wondering if I really wanted

to be a pastor. Meanwhile, the phone kept ringing. So I turned the

ringer off because it was otherwise very hard to ignore.

I decided that though a pastor was supposed to answer the phone

and help people, I would end up with a gun to my head if I did. And

since I had no boss and the church was not paying me, I decided

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 60

02/03/06 11:44:33 AM

45 – 75 People • 61

to just keep doing what I thought Jesus wanted me to do instead of

doing what the people in the church wanted me to do. I realized

that people would not be knocking on my door asking me to save

them or be their pastor, so I decided to just go get some more people

and let my other leaders deal with the ones we already had. For me,

our church was not the people we had but primarily the people we

did not yet have, and I needed to go get those people. I’m still not

sure if most pastors are aware that their churches are comprised of

people they don’t yet know. Those people will never come to the

churches, so the pastors need to go to those people.

The hard part was figuring out where to begin in trying to

gather people. It seemed weird to just start hitting on total strangers at places like coffee shops, trying to get them to pray the sinner’s

prayer, like a spiritual flasher.

After a few days of leaving the ringer off, I felt guilty and turned

the phone back on. But the phone started ringing again and I could

not concentrate, so I ignored the phone and went for a walk to

prayerfully think through how I could meet people to bring them

to our church.

Then it dawned on me that we were getting a visitor or two

at church every week and that low-hanging fruit would probably

be the easiest to pick. So on Sundays I started carrying a stack of

blank notecards in my pocket. Our church was small enough that I

knew who the visitors were. I would walk up, introduce myself, and

ask a few leading questions to see if they were members at another

church or visiting from out of town because I did not want to waste

my time. Those people who seemed worth getting to know would

get a card on which to write down their contact information, and I

would schedule a meeting with them on the spot and write it in my

appointment book to ensure we had a scheduled appointment.

I started by scheduling meetings in coffee shops because I had

no office and no money to pay for lunch. Worse still, I wasn’t even

a coffee drinker. I spent the weekdays driving all over the region to

meet with people and tell them the gospel and sell them on my mission for our church. Some of the time I got stood up after driving

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 61

02/03/06 11:44:33 AM

62 • Jesus, If Anyone Else Calls . . .

more than an hour to a meeting, so I started bringing books to

read while I waited. But I kept scheduling meetings in an effort to

convert the lost to Jesus and convert the found to our mission with

Jesus so that the church could move forward. I soon noticed that

those people I had personally connected with tended to stick with

our church, start serving, and start bringing friends to church who

I would then meet with over coffee to repeat the cycle. It actually

worked, and, one person at a time, we slowly began to grow.

Our church ser vices started to stink a whole lot less. We scraped

together enough money to buy some big honking speakers, and I

stole an unused sound console from my old church along with a

projection screen, which were sins that Jesus thankfully died to forgive. After a series of incredibly painful worship leader auditions,

not unlike the reject episodes of American Idol, we finally landed a

guy who was a legitimately good worship leader. But then his wife

ran off on him and he needed a break, so we returned to stinking

again. It felt like finally getting a date with the hot girl only to have

her dump you on the first date right after a good kiss.

At this point, we were running between fifty and sixty young

people. Then we finally got some older people who came two Sundays in a row, which was a big deal. I introduced myself and discovered that they were Brethren people. I did not know what a Brethren

person was but did notice that they carried King James Bibles, Mom

had a doily on her head, and Dad wanted to argue about the rapture

a lot. Their huge pile of kids all shared the glazed look of lobotomy

test cases. From what I could tell, their father actually had a job,

which meant he might tithe, and no one in their family had been in

rehab before, so it seemed like we were on the brink of becoming

more cross-cultural.

I asked them if they were interested in committing to the church,

and they said that their only requirement was that their kids could

perform their handbell choir routine in front of the church on Sundays. Honestly, I did not know what a handbell choir was, and they

tried to explain it, but I did not understand. So the following Sunday the kids brought their handbells to church to give me a dem0310270162_confess_rev.indd 62

02/03/06 11:44:34 AM

45 – 75 People • 63

onstration. The mom beamed under her doily as the kids put on

their white gloves and started banging their bells in what I guess

is what you consider a lovely song if your dad is not a construction

worker who drives an El Camino, like my dad.

When the kids finished, I tried to explain that I did not think

that white gloves and handbells would be popular with our chainsmoking indie rockers. The Brethren people said they would be

willing to allow the indie rockers to play worship music first as long

as their kids could do their handbell choir performance at the end

of the church ser vices as a sort of grand finale.

It was at that time that I realized our church would never have a

sign out front that said “Everyone welcome,” because I did not want

everyone. Instead, I wanted people who would reach out to the lost

young people in our area. So the Brethren folks and their handbells

and their doily left our church.

Around the same time, we had a very peculiar thing happen.

We had avowed to be nothing but a church for college students and

singles. Though we did not run a nursery or accommodate families

with young children, another family with young children showed

up. They were so old they seemed downright antediluvian. Phil and

Jen were in their thirties, really nice people, spiritually mature, did

not own an electric guitar, did not smoke, did not have tattoos, and

did not ask for anything. They did say that they felt called to help

our church by serving in any way we needed and giving money.

They were actually serious about wanting to stick with us.

Phil asked what our plan was for child care, and I told him we

did not do anything for children. He kindly asked if I had any children, and I said no. He then asked if I intended to have any kids,

and I said yes. He then asked what I planned to do with my kids.

And I had no idea. So we were on the horns of a terrible dilemma.

I had foolishly told our church that we would not do anything for

kids, but it became obvious that eventually almost everyone in the

church would get married and have kids, and some would also have

kids before they were married because they were sinfully fornicating. Either way, we needed to have a plan for kids.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 63

02/03/06 11:44:34 AM

64 • Jesus, If Anyone Else Calls . . .

A buzz was growing about ministry to Generation X. In retrospect, this was a dumb idea, which should have been obvious

because the name “Generation X” was made up by a Canadian

guy. Worse still, he probably ripped off the name from the Billy

Idol song of the same name. Anyway, I declared that we would be

a Generation X church because it seemed cool. To this day I cannot fathom why I was so stupid, because I obviously was not going

to card people at the door like a bar to make sure they were born

between certain years to attend our church and hear the gospel.

Within a few months of study on the issue, I came to a number of

conclusions about generational age-specific ministry that made me

regret declaring such a dumb thing.

First, the fat old white guys from the Midwest with more degrees

than Fahrenheit who were writing books on Generation X knew as

much about Generation X as a redneck does about Dostoyevsky.

They were all saying that those people born between roughly

1965 and 1976 would be the poorest generation in history, starving to death and wandering around naked and gaunt like a nation

of supermodels. But the people in my church were starting small,

profitable tech companies and digging into the Internet pot of gold

at Microsoft.

Second, as I studied Scripture, I learned that a generation refers

to the people living on the earth at a particular time and not to

various age groups (e.g., Num. 32:13; Matt. 17:17). So the Bible was

not interested in focusing on people between certain birthdays

but rather in bringing the gospel to everyone who is breathing,

because those are the kind of people God has called us to reach.

Therefore, not only was having a church that catered only to people

between certain ages narrow, it was also sinful because God loves

the whole world and not just white guys between their teens and

late twenties.

Third, as I studied the history of pop culture, I learned that the

generational theory was a recent invention that apparently began

with the hippies. The story is that the hippies were the first Ameri0310270162_confess_rev.indd 64

02/03/06 11:44:34 AM

45 – 75 People • 65

can generation to break from their parents and forge for themselves

an independent identity marked by getting stoned more than the

apostle Paul and raging against some guy called “the man,” who was

apparently quite busy causing every evil in the world. As I researched

the hippies, I learned that the Chris tian version of being hippiefied

was called the Jesus Movement and led to such nondenominational

denominations as Calvary Chapel and the Vineyard.

Since a lot of the people in my church played guitar and sinfully

smoked pot, I thought that maybe the hippie pastors could help me

figure out what to do. So I went to some of their churches. Sadly, all

the hippie Chris tians I met had become yuppies who stopped raging against “the man” so that they could get haircuts, minivans, and

become “the man.” This further confirmed that generational identity is very faddish and that eventually people sober up, get a job,

get married, pump out a few kids, fall into a predictable rut of voting Republican to lower their taxes, and graduate from homegrown

pot to prescription medication to manage their unspectacular life

under the sun.

Fourth, after reading more books and articles than I cared to, I

decided to just start asking some of the new converts who had met

Christ in our church what would most help them to grow in their

relationship with Jesus. Each young person I spoke to said they

wanted to be connected to people younger and older than themselves. The young urban arty types God had burdened me to build

a church for generally came from jacked-up homes, which they

wanted to overcome in hopes of one day having a decent future for

themselves and their kids. But they had no idea what a decent Christian family looked like. So what they needed was a friendship with

godly older families to learn about marriage and parenting. The last

thing they needed was a mono-generational church.

The only problem was that our city has less Chris tians and

young children than nearly every other city in our nation.1 Tragically, we actually have less children than dogs in our city.2 And

finding godly older families who were willing to serve new converts

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 65

02/03/06 11:44:34 AM

66 • Jesus, If Anyone Else Calls . . .

instead of demanding to fill their face at our programming trough

proved tougher than finding someone with an IQ bigger than their

waist working at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

So I decided we needed to welcome Phil, Jen, and their kids as a

gift from God. We also needed to make our church accommodating

to other families, not simply to attract consumers but to welcome

families who wanted to be missionaries, opening their homes and

sharing their lives with lost people and new converts to give them a

picture of what the gospel does to transform lives.

That Sunday, I repented before our church for my dumb idea of

having a Generation X church, which was good because it set the

precedent of me standing up to recant my dumb ideas so that we can

get unstuck on our mission of bringing the gospel of Jesus to our

city. So we started running a nursery for small children during our

ser vice. Curiously, the singles and college students really enjoyed

getting to know children and their families and began volunteering

to play with the kids. It dawned on me that by working with the

kids, a lot of our young people were learning from the kids about

parenting and were learning from friendships with the parents what

kind of person they would need to become to marry and begin a

family of their own.

Young couples also started falling in love and wanted to get

married. So I wrote a series of premarital Bible studies. Before long,

this became a quarterly Bible study that filled our home to capacity because little biblical teaching on gender, marriage, and family

was available in our city. We encouraged the young couples to send

us their friends who were approaching marriage, which helped our

church grow.

Eventually I’ll write some books on these subjects, but for the

sake of brevity, I will now simply come out of the closet and reveal

that I am an intense biblical literalist who believes that the man is

the head of the home, that the man should provide for his family,

that children are a blessing, and that we would not have so many

deceived feminists running around if men were better husbands

and fathers because the natural reaction of godly women to godly

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 66

02/03/06 11:44:34 AM

45 – 75 People • 67

men is trust and respect. For some, this theological instruction was

as popular as a fart in an elevator, and they left our church. But the

more than one hundred couples we trained in the first few years of

the class remain happily married today and serve Jesus as missionaries, knowing that their marriage is for the gospel as much as the

gospel is for their marriage.

So I had to buy my first suit and figure out how to officiate a

wedding. In time, I got pretty comfortable doing the gig and had a

lot of fun seeing people marry. The most enjoyable weddings were

those of couples who came to faith in Jesus during the premarital

Bible study in our home.

The couples who did premarital counseling with us caught our

vision for the church and became some of our best and most devoted

church leaders. They started doing a lot of ministry without being

asked or organized and simply started taking matters into their

own hands. Before long, we had people opening their homes to host

Bible studies, various house parties on weekends, baby showers for

expecting moms, and wedding showers for new brides, and also

delivering meals to new moms recovering from birth and showing

up early and staying late on Sundays to help get things done for the

ser vice.

Though our church was still small, I was surprised at how

quickly I became buried in caring for only a few people. Because

I was a brand-new pastor, I learned to provide pastoral care on the

job, which is a lot like taking a driver’s education class by driving a

stick shift on the freeway during rush hour. For example, one young

man who was a newer Chris tian engaged to be married called me

late one night and asked me to hurry to the hospital. When I got

there, he informed me that his only living relative, his mother, had

doused herself in gasoline and lit herself on fire in an attempt to

commit suicide. She had burned her entire body, was lying near

death in the hospital, and was being kept alive by a machine. He did

not know if he should pull the plug and let her die or try to keep her

alive despite the fact that she was as good as dead. I had no idea what

to say. On one hand, it seemed the woman clearly wanted to die, and

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 67

02/03/06 11:44:35 AM

68 • Jesus, If Anyone Else Calls . . .

the doctors said she would die but it could be weeks or months of

lingering pain before that happened. On the other hand, the young

man did not want to live with the guilt of causing the death of his

own mother. I remember sitting in the hospital lobby with my face

in my hands, praying James 1:5 over and over. To make matters

worse, his mother was not saved, in a coma, and likely brain-dead,

which prevented us from sharing the gospel with her. In the end,

we decided to pull the plug, and he watched his unsaved mother die

quickly.

Emotionally, ministry proved to be more exhausting than I

could have fathomed. Because I deeply loved my people and carried

their burdens, the pains of our people’s lives began to take a deep

toll on me. Many nights were spent in prayer for people instead of

sleeping, and even on what were supposed to be days off, my mind

was consumed with the painful hardships and sinful rebellions of

our people.

By this time, a bit of a buzz was going out about our church,

but no one could find us because we had no office from which to

coordinate communication and we were meeting in a rented church

on Sunday nights. A friend in the church named Marc was a tech

guy and put together a website without even being asked. Since it

was pretty dang cool, I gave him permission to put it on the Internet, and it really did help people find us and made a statement to

the young tech crowd that we shared their value for technology.

Curiously, our website quickly became our new front door through

which people passed before they showed up at church.

And we finally landed a good worship leader. Brad was a godly

guy with a nice wife, who fronted a local band that was big in the

club-scene heyday of flannel-wearing grunge gods like Nirvana

and Pearl Jam. Following one particularly dreadful Sunday worship set by a well-intended guy whose singing sounded like he was

being electrocuted, Brad had had enough and asked to take over

the worship. He soon showed up with a bunch of guys from his old

band who smelled like cigarettes, including a guy with long hair

and another guy with tattoos. So things looked very promising.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 68

02/03/06 11:44:35 AM

45 – 75 People • 69

Adjusting to the new room at the fundamentalist church was

tough. The acoustics were deplorable because the room was not

designed for live rock. The echo was so bad that some people thought

the electric guitar players were on reverb when they weren’t. The

hardest thing was controlling the drum kit volume because the

drummer used what appeared to be baseball bats instead of drumsticks and beat the kit as if it were Rodney King. Somebody suggested that we could do what other churches did and put up a plastic

shield in front of the drummer to control the volume, but the drummer threatened to quit and refused to be caged in like a zoo animal.

So we just let them bring a hard rock flavor for our Savior. Man,

the band was so good that our little church ser vice really started to

come together, and a lot of musicians started showing up because

they appreciated the band.

The preaching, however, was still pretty brutal. We were trying to be a church without a primary leader and wanted to have

Mike, Lief, and me co-pastor the church and share the pulpit. I

preached topical sermons that were nothing more than doctrinal

lectures filled with big theological words that nobody understood.

Mike, an ex-jock, preached as if he were a football coach giving a

motivational speech at halftime and said “you know” every third

word. And no matter what the text was, Lief always had the same

two points: (1) You suck. (2) You need to change.

Because the preaching had no continuity from week to week,

people were confused. Lief was running a construction company,

and Mike was running a campus ministry at the University of

Washington, so I was the only person focusing full-time on the

church. I really wanted to just take the pulpit and figure out how

to preach by doing it every week, but I also wanted to respect these

older, more seasoned, and very godly men. In time, they sat me

down and said that they believed in me, wanted to cover my back,

and wanted me to take the pulpit and lead the church.

This was one of the most important things that ever happened to

me in ministry. I was young and filled with great hope and terrible

fear. To some degree, I had been wrongly allowing Mike and Lief to

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 69

02/03/06 11:44:35 AM

70 • Jesus, If Anyone Else Calls . . .

shoulder the burden because I feared failure and hoped to share the

blame if things went poorly. But I also knew that God had spoken

to me and had clearly called me to lead the church. Their humility

and support gave me enough faith to step up, take the pulpit, and

lead the church. In retrospect, it is a testament to the character of

these men that they supported me. They could have easily split our

little church three ways but instead laid down their own power for

the best interest of our mission to bring the gospel to Seattle. To

this day, I thank God for both men.

When I started to preach nearly every week, I slowly got better as I figured out my own style and started to include my own

peculiar sarcasm. In time, I became more comfortable and was able

to preach without relying on my notes and began to use my humor

to make my points, which allowed my personality to finally come

through in the sermons. Admittedly, my preaching was not that

good for a few years yet, but I was encouraged that at least I had

progressed from really bad to just bad.

I began reading biographies of legendary preachers and learned

that anointed preaching can only flow out of an anointed preacher

who spends time alone with God in prayer and Scripture.3 I also

started studying stand-up comedians because, besides preachers,

they are the only people in our culture who stand on a stage and

speak to an audience for an extended period of time. In my opinion,

Chris Rock is the most skilled comedic communicator alive today,

and some years later, my wife bought us good seats to see him live,

which was a better study in homiletics than most classes on the

subject.

Anyway, our church started as a Bible study with a handful of

people, and over the course of about six months, it grew to be a good

weekly ser vice of about seventy people, with a great band, child care,

and hope.

Then the summer came. In Seattle the weather is darker than

an Edgar Allen Poe story for about nine months of the year. But the

summers are glorious. So people spend their summers outdoors,

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 70

02/03/06 11:44:35 AM

45 – 75 People • 71

soaking up every minute of sun they can before the suicidal rains of

fall overtake them.

Unfortunately, our little church met at 6:00 p.m. on Sunday

nights in a hot church without air-conditioning, and the attendance

started thinning to the degree that it looked like some of us had

missed the rapture. I feared that if we did not do something creative,

the church could easily shrink back down to a few dozen people.

Scrambling for ideas, I agreed to cancel a Sunday church ser vice

to let some of our long-haired public-radio types take us outside to

do a large joint art project they had proposed. They gave each of us

a large chunk of paper on which to paint something that symbolized our personality, which they would then string together as a

large mural highlighting the different personalities in our church.

As a truck-driving jock who watches a lot of Ultimate Fighting, I

can honestly say it was the gayest thing I have ever been a part of.

I feared ending up with a church of chickified arty dudes drinking

herbal tea and standing around talking about their feelings, as illustrated by their finger painting. To this day, I twitch like a Vietnam

vet just thinking about the mural.

So instead of murals, we started a midweek outdoor Bible study

at a park across from the church we were meeting at. We met there

each week for barbecue, volleyball, Frisbee golf, acoustic guitar worship, and a Bible study that I taught. Fortunately, this idea worked.

People liked hanging out together, the handful of little kids we had

wrestled with the college students, people brought their friends,

and passersby often joined in with us. Through this simple weekly

event, we not only held our people together but actually grew a

little bit, and we learned that churches can grow in the summer.

As the summer was winding down, we were preparing for a big

fall launch of our little church plant on the first Sunday in October 1996. I was feeling encouraged — until all hell broke loose and

nearly killed us.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 71

02/03/06 11:44:35 AM

72 • Jesus, If Anyone Else Calls . . .

Reformission Reflections

1. Which type(s) of people likely feel most welcome in your

church or ministry? Why?

2. Which type(s) of people likely feel least welcome in your church

or ministry? What could be done to actively welcome those

people?

3. Why do people come to your church or ministry? What draws

them in and keeps them committed?

4. Why do people leave your church or ministry? Should anything

be done to be more welcoming to those people who leave your

church or ministry?

5. What agendas and missions that differ from that of your church

or ministry have people tried to bring in? Were these ideas

welcomed or rejected? What were the consequences of these

people staying or leaving?

6. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being poor and 10 being excellent,

how good are the attractional elements of preaching and

worship music at your church? What could be done to improve

those scores?

7. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being poor and 10 being excellent,

how good is your church or ministry at equipping and sending

people out to be missionaries where they live?

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 72

02/03/06 11:44:35 AM

I was living with my boyfriend

until I got saved. We got married

and now I’m a deacon

coordinating weddings.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 73

02/03/06 11:44:36 AM

Jesus, Satan Showed Up

and I Can’t Find My Cup

75 – 150 People

A few weeks before we launched our little church plant in the fall of

1996, I was perplexed by an older man who had become something

of a mentor to me. He was pushing some theological ideas that I did

not agree with, such as ministers in skirts. But I was conflicted. On

one hand, I really liked the idea of having a seasoned older pastor in

the church to help compensate for my inexperience. On the other

hand, my very discerning wife had the same Ghost check in her gut

as I did. So since it was ultimately Jesus’ church, we began praying

that God would reveal to us what we should do about this man who

wanted to be a pastor in the church and oversee our discipleship

process.

The first clue that something was funky came when I let him

preach his first sermon in our church. He brought his wife up to

team teach with him, something I had not agreed to. As they were

teaching, he told the story of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem

on the back of an ass in fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy.

He actually pulled me up onto the stage in front of the church and

asked me to get on my hands and knees to play the part of the ass.

The move seemed like an overt power play and was at least mildly

disrespectful. I remembered Paul’s command not to rebuke an older

man harshly and quietly wondered if that included punching one in

the mouth.

The second clue came in the form of a prophetic dream. I had

never had a prophetic dream. I actually was not sure that such

miraculous things still happened and was skeptical of prophetic

74

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 74

02/03/06 11:44:39 AM

75 – 150 People • 75

dreams altogether. But while I was sleeping one night, the Holy

Spirit gave me a dream in which I was standing in the foyer of our

rented church on the opening night of our church plant. As I turned

around in my dream, the older man walked in by himself, carrying a

Bible in a brown leather case and wearing a blue shirt, green shorts,

sandals, and a homemade cross around his neck. He informed me

that he wanted to pastor the church and that I should step aside and

let him. God then spoke Acts 20:28 – 31 to me, saying, “Keep watch

over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made

you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought

with his own blood. I know that after I leave, savage wolves will

come in among you and will not spare the flock. Even from your

own number men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw

away disciples after them. So be on your guard!”

God then spoke through 1 Peter 5:1 – 4: “To the elders among

you, I appeal as a fellow elder, a witness of Christ’s sufferings and

one who also will share in the glory to be revealed: Be shepherds

of God’s flock that is under your care, serving as overseers — not

because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you

to be; not greedy for money, but eager to serve; not lording it over

those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock. And when

the Chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the crown of glory

that will never fade away.”

I then woke up to tell my wife that God had revealed to me that

the older man was a wolf sent by Satan and that Jesus wanted me

to protect and lead the small flock he had given me. We prayed

together. The next day I told Mike, Lief, and another pastor-buddy

named Greg about the dream and asked them to hold it in confidence. Since that time, I have had many other similar dreams and

words from God and always know they are from God because they

come true and are confirmed by God with Scripture.

My wife, Grace, and I fasted and prayed for the week leading up

to our first public church ser vice. The only advertising we could

afford was invitations we had printed up for our people to give to

friends and family, but we were hoping for a big turnout.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 75

02/03/06 11:44:39 AM

76 • Jesus, Satan Showed Up . . .

On the opening night of our church plant in October of 1996,

the ser vice was just getting started when my wife realized that she

had forgotten her Bible in the foyer. I jumped up to get it, and as I

turned around, I found myself standing alone in the foyer, just as

I had been in my dream. The older man then walked in the door

wearing the same outfit he had worn in the dream and came toward

me speaking every word he had in my dream. I was so stunned that

I was momentarily speechless.

When I collected my thoughts, I told him to leave our church

and never come back. A few months later, another older pastor contacted me and said that the man God warned me of had been kicked

out of his denomination on suspicion of undermining young pastors

and taking money from young churches.

After kicking the man out, I walked down the church aisle and

handed my wife her Bible on my way up to preach from Acts 17

about Paul on Mars Hill — the name and ministry philosophy for

our church. Between 160 and 200 people had shown up for our big

kickoff ser vice. The room was really dark, we had a lot of candles,

and the music was very cool if you were into suicide. One of our

long-haired arty types turned all the lights off and read Nietzsche’s

“The Madman” by candlelight, which was supposed to make us very

bohemian and cool but just kind of scared the handful of normal

people in attendance. The following week we leveled off at around

80 to 100 people as the friends, family, and well-wishers who came

for the launch went back to their churches. Then the hard work

began.

Our people did not know the Bible, and I kept trying to teach

them systematic theology through the Sunday sermons, which did

not work. They were very skeptical of systematic theology and did

not trust anyone stringing verses together. But they were willing to

learn the Bible. So I decided to try to teach them a book of the Bible

by going through it verse by verse. For some insane reason, I chose

Ecclesiastes and absolutely butchered the book because learning to

preach biblical theology with Ecclesiastes is harder than medical

students learning surgery by operating on themselves.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 76

02/03/06 11:44:39 AM

75 – 150 People • 77

We continued to meet on Sunday nights until Christmas, when

some of the arty types started complaining that there was a preaching monologue instead of an open dialogue, as would become popular with some emerging pastors a few years later. This forced me

to think through my theology of preaching, spiritual authority,

and the authority of Scripture. I did an intense study of the Old

Testament prophets and the New Testament commands regarding

preaching and teaching. In the end, I decided not to back off from a

preaching monologue but instead to work hard at becoming a solid

long-winded, old-school Bible preacher that focused on Jesus. My

people needed to hear from God’s Word and not from each other in

collective ignorance like some dumb chat room.

After the prophetic dream from God, I thought we were in the

clear and that Satan had been exposed so that we could continue

growing our church. But enemy fire just kept coming.

All of our musicians except Brad started pushing a theological agenda that read pretty much like a lot of the nonsense being

bantered about by some emerging pastors today, trying to reinvent

Chris tian orthodoxy, which is by definition heresy. They decided

that truth is relative, that all religions are right, that Jesus did not

die as a substitute for our sin, and that everyone will likely go to

heaven. They notified me of this during our church ser vice when

they stopped playing music to read texts from other religions.

In a tense confrontational meeting immediately after church,

they droned on and on about how we needed to start having other

religious leaders teach at our church in addition to me so that our

church could embrace many religions and be true to our postmodern culture of pluralism. Because these musicians were not teachable, I kicked them out that night, and we went more than a month

without any worship music in ser vices. Some of the folks who had

tried out as worship leaders during the core phase volunteered but

were pretty horrible, so I decided to go without music until we

sorted things out because silence is better than painful music.

One of our core values was beauty, and we had built much of our

church identity on being cool and having good music, but suddenly

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 77

02/03/06 11:44:39 AM

78 • Jesus, Satan Showed Up . . .

we had nothing. So our church ser vices were reduced to me preaching for about an hour, taking prayer requests, and closing in prayer.

It was a brutal time. I decided that being cool, having good music,

understanding postmodern epistemology, and welcoming all kinds

of strange people into the church is essentially worthless if at

the bedrock of the church anything other than a rigorous Jesus centered biblical theology guides the mission of the church. And I

needed to labor to continually improve as a Bible preacher because

there is enough power in the preaching of God’s Word alone to

build a church from nothing. It seemed that we were in a spiritual

war and that if light was going to spread throughout our dark city,

it would have to emanate from the pulpit.

To make matters worse, one of our most talented leaders started

embracing a postmodern hermeneutic and was trying to convince

our people that the meaning of Scripture is relative and we should

each have our own perspectives. Consequently, he also started taking carloads of our people, including newer converts, to a renegade

mystical Catholic church in the mornings as well as to a New Age

self-help cult during the week, which charged huge amounts of

money to convince people that they were not sinners and could

achieve anything they wanted through sheer will. He picked up

this nonsense at a seminary where the Bible interpretation professor ended up being more postmodern than Chris tian. The professor wound up getting divorced a few times, which just proved to

me that often people who mess with the Bible want to sin instead of

repent, which explains why they bury Scripture under philosophical fads (Rom. 1:18).

In retrospect, this season was marked by intense spiritual warfare and demonic attacks that nearly killed me and the church. I

had naively gathered people into our church but was not discerning as to who should be allowed to lead and influence others. Just

as I thought we were coming together, things began to fall apart

and heretics were seeking to hijack our gospel, false teachers were

seeking to hijack our mission, and nutjobs were seeking to hijack

our people. I painfully learned the importance of evaluating people,

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 78

02/03/06 11:44:39 AM

75 – 150 People • 79

and over the years I have noticed various kinds of people who come

into the church.

People who come into a church need to be assessed so that the church

leaders can identify who they are and what they need.

• Horses

are vibrant leaders who pull a lot of weight and run fast.

Horses need to have character, sound doctrine, and agree with the

vision of the church.

• Colts

are emerging leaders who need training, testing, and opportunities to lead. If properly broken in, a colt can be developed into a

horse.

• Fish are non-Chris tians who are spiritually lost and often not actively

looking for God. Fish need a Chris tian friend to lovingly introduce

them to Jesus and his church.

• Eagles are skilled leaders who are being developed within the church

with the express kingdom purpose of leaving the proverbial nest and

leading a ministry elsewhere, such as missions work and church

planting.

• Mules are faithful workers who dependably and continually do whatever is asked of them in the church. Mules need to be thanked and

protected from burnout.

• Cows

are selfish people who wander from church to church, chewing

up resources without ever giving back to the church until they kill it. A

fence needs to be built around the church to keep the cows out.

• Squirrels are people who are generally liked because they are nice,

but they rarely do anything meaningful. Squirrels need to be put to

work in the church.

• Stray

cats are socially peculiar loners who linger around the church.

Stray cats need a friend to help bring them into the church and an

opportunity to serve other people so that they can be meaningfully

connected to the church.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 79

02/03/06 11:44:40 AM

80 • Jesus, Satan Showed Up . . .

• Rats

are people who appear to have the potential to have a fruitful

ministry, but they lack dependability, humility, or maturity. Rats need

to be rebuked, and if they do not repent, they must be strategically

ignored until they commit to no longer being a waste of time and

effort.

• Sheep

are people who have legitimate needs that require patient

and loving support. Examples of sheep include widows, orphans, and

those who are seriously ill or fighting addictions. Sheep need to be

loved and served.

• Ducks are disgruntled people who continually quack about whatever they are unhappy about. Ducks need to stop quacking, or the

pastor(s) must go duck hunting before the ducks drown out everyone

and everything else in the church.

• Wolves

are false teachers whom Satan sends into the church to

devour Jesus’ sheep. Wolves need to be quickly identified, rebuked,

and if they are unrepentant, they must be shot before their false

teaching destroys people in the church.

• Snakes

are evil people sent by the Serpent on a mission to destroy

the church through anything from sexual sin to starting rumors. Leaders must stomp on the heads of snakes before they bite people and

infect them with deadly venom.

During this season, I was unsure that our church would survive.

The artists who had left really hurt our reputation in their circles of

influence. The variety of heretics we had in our church caused some

local churches to wonder if we weren’t a cult with candles, depressing music, and an inexperienced young pastor who said “dude” a

lot. And the soft church people from our core group started to wilt

under the pressure.

I hit a particularly low point one day when a young couple

knocked on the door of our home. We had invested hundreds of

hours in the young woman, dating back to our college ministry.

Her husband was a new Chris tian whom she had met in the church.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 80

02/03/06 11:44:40 AM

75 – 150 People • 81

We had done their premarital counseling, and I had officiated their

wedding. When they got married, they could not even afford a

couch, so I drove one of ours over in my truck and gave it to them.

We considered them friends until they came over to tell us they had

left the church. They complained that since the church had grown

a bit bigger and things a bit busier, my wife and I had become less

available to them.

My wife and I were both working other jobs because the church

could not pay me and were volunteering more than forty hours a

week to the church. Being rejected by friends felt like a punch in

the gut.

We were stunned. We needed couples like this to help the

church survive, not jump ship just because my wife could not drop

everything to take this woman out to tea whenever was convenient

for her. The odd thing was that they transferred to a megachurch

in the suburbs, which made no sense because they would get no

closer to that pastor and his wife than they had to Grace and me.

Yet they knocked on our door unannounced to tell us we were not

doing enough for them. It seemed obvious to me that they wanted

us to bend over backward and promise to do anything to make them

happy in order to keep them in the church. But I simply gave up and

sent them on their way because they were not on our mission to

bring the gospel to Seattle. For them, the mission was to get Grace

and me to jump like trained dogs upon command.

In retrospect, this was a hard lesson, one that I have had to learn

many times in the various seasons of our church. As a church grows,

it also changes. And as a church changes, so does the accessibility of

the pastor and his family. As the pastor gets busier with new people

and responsibilities, some people are displaced and are not as close

to the pastor as they had been. Displaced people are prone to expect

the pastor to ensure that their access to him and his family will

never change. If the pastor agrees to these demands, he will keep

the disgruntled people but not reach any new people because the

mission will shift from reaching new people to pleasing old people.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 81

02/03/06 11:44:41 AM

82 • Jesus, Satan Showed Up . . .

No matter what leaders in this situation do, they will lose people

and must wisely choose who they will lose.

By this time, we had morphed into two different congregations.

Half of the people were committed to building a church that brought

the gospel to the city and were willing to faithfully serve that mission. The other half of the people were mainly young, burned-out

church kids who wanted to be cool, have an artists enclave, and

deconstruct everything remotely Chris tian.

As an ex-baseball player, I realized that with all the craziness

in the church, I needed to be the umpire. Some years later at a

Leadership Network event, I had dinner with the church growth

Yoda, Lyle Schaller. He told a story about an old umpire he had met.

He asked the umpire how he felt after making the wrong call. The

umpire stated that he never made a wrong call. Puzzled, Schaller

asked if he truly believed that he had never called a safe man out, an

out man safe, a ball a strike, or a strike a ball. The umpire said that

he had never made a bad call. Schaller asked him how that could be,

and the umpire simply said, “It ain’t nothing until I call it.”

In my church, I had heretics calling themselves Chris tians, and

I had lazy, selfish Chris tians calling themselves mature. I needed to

start making the calls. So I started meeting with people one-on-one

and calling them everything from sinners who needed to repent, to

leaders who needed to lead, to heretics who needed to leave. It was

a brutal season, but I kept going back to my dream in which God

said the problems would come from within the church and I was

supposed to lead the church and obey Jesus, who was our Senior

Pastor.

Though our church was brand-new, we had already lost focus of

our mission, and people were debating if the heretics should have

been kicked out and other things that were a waste of time. So I

decided to create a crisis that would force everyone to focus on a

mission and pull together to accomplish a task. I have learned that

sometimes the most important thing a leader can do is to create

strategic chaos that forces people to pull together and focus on an

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 82

02/03/06 11:44:41 AM

75 – 150 People • 83

urgent need, thereby subtly getting rid of all their other missions

and complaints in a subversive way.

Our attendance had declined to about sixty or seventy people,

and those who remained liked our little church meeting by candlelight in a lovely old church on Sunday nights and would have been

happy to continue forever without much change. So I moved our

church out of our nice little building right before Christmas with

only a few weeks notice in an effort to shake things up and give us a

fresh start in a new place some twenty minutes away. The neighborhood we moved to is a few miles from the University of Washington

and is a ritzy type of place where all the kids, named Buffy and Biff,

spend their days learning Latin while being driven around by their

nanny. A Presbyterian church there had died, and we rented their

vacant church building. We finally got a few offices but had to keep

our ser vice at 6:00 p.m. because an Asian church met there in the

morning.

In the move, we lost some of our least-committed people, as I

was hoping we would. We were able to set up part of the building

as if it were our own. We actually got to put a sign out front, which

was a big deal because it felt like we were stabilizing. We also got

to paint the classrooms, set up our nursery rooms, leave our sound

system set up, hang paintings on the walls, and use the beautiful

classic church sanctuary with wooden pews and wooden arches as a

lovely space for a dark, arty evening ser vice by candlelight.

In the new building, we finally opened an office and hired a

part-time secretary, which was a huge relief. But I failed to compile a formal job description, conduct a formal interview process,

or conduct regular evaluations, which caused frustration for both

me and the young woman I hired. The truth is that while I knew I

needed some support staff in the office to make the bank deposits,

answer the phone, take in the mail, return the email, and so on, I

did not really know how to hire or manage a staff.

We also began having dinner together as a church on Wednesday nights, with a handful of classes and Bible studies scattering

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 83

02/03/06 11:44:41 AM

84 • Jesus, Satan Showed Up . . .

throughout the building after the meal. Mike started a film and

theology discussion group. Previously we had a few Bible studies

meeting in homes throughout the city that were doing okay because

they were taught by Mike, Lief, and me. But we really had no place

to relationally connect new people until Wednesday night opened

up. It cemented relationships in our church and quickly connected

some new people into friendships. It also allowed theological training for our newer Chris tians, which would help protect us from

further attacks by false teachers.

We still lacked a worship leader. But on some weeks a guy named

Dave Bazan played guitar and sang when he was not touring with

his band, Pedro the Lion.

Within a few months, Brad pulled together enough new musicians for another band, and all we lacked was a drummer. So I

decided to empty the church bank account and buy a brand-new

custom-built drum kit. Week after week, we set up the kit in the

center of the stage for the church ser vice and did not allow anyone

to play it. Because of my insecurity, I had until now worked very

hard to conceal our needs in an effort to give the impression that

we had everything together. But I decided our needs would never

be filled unless we made them visible. So I placed the shiny green,

virgin drum kit up as the centerpiece of our worship set each week

and prayed that a drummer would eventually ask me why no one

was playing it.

Then Matt introduced himself. He had attended a few times to

check us out. Matt was a tall, slender, hip-looking, punk-rock guy

with greased-back hair, kind of like a neo – Happy Days dude. He

has played on more albums for Tooth and Nail Records than any

other musician in the history of the label, for punk bands such as

Plankeye and Roadside Monument. He asked why we did not have

a drummer playing the drum kit, and I explained that I was praying

for a guy like him to volunteer. He offered to play and is flat out one

of the most amazing drummers I have ever heard.

Additionally, he turned out to be a godly man who to this day

remains a dear friend, a Bible study leader, and a drummer in our

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 84

02/03/06 11:44:42 AM

75 – 150 People • 85

church. Once Matt joined us, we suddenly gained credibility again

with a lot of folks in the music scene, and before long, other good

musicians were checking us out since Matt was our missionary into

their tribe. Finally we had a band again, were in a new building that

was pretty cool, had some offices, had a midweek event going, and

were getting some traction.

At the time, I was wrestling through some theological issues,

such as election, predestination, and other matters generally known

as reformed theology. So I taught through the book of Romans on

Sunday nights, which helped to clarify our doctrinal convictions as

a church and cemented us as a church with a reformed view of God

and salvation. If you don’t know what that means, the gist is that

people suck and God saves us from ourselves. For more details, you

can read the book I’ll write on it in the future or just accept a plain,

literal reading of Romans, particularly Romans 9 – 11.

Anyway, we began to grow again and went from 80 people to

around 130 in about nine months. It really felt as if we had turned

a corner. One Sunday night we had our biggest attendance since

our launch and ballooned to perhaps 150 in our room that could

hold only a few more people than that. It was the first time people

needed to sit in the balcony because the main floor was full, and the

room was buzzing with excitement.

At the beginning of one church ser vice, one of our leaders was

up front leading the church in a time of prayer. Various people

prayed aloud for our city and church. I was sitting with my wife,

Grace, when God spoke to me and told me to go to the front of the

church. So I got up and walked to the front of the church. Since

everyone’s heads were bowed and eyes were closed in prayer, no

one seemed to notice my getting up. I felt awkward but stood there

for a few moments, when a young man whom I had not seen before

started praying from the back of the room.

Suddenly his voice changed and got very loud and authoritative, commanding us to stop worshiping Jesus and trust in ourselves

instead. He stood up and looked me in the eye with a crazy look

and sprinted down the center aisle of the church, spouting absolute

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 85

02/03/06 11:44:42 AM

86 • Jesus, Satan Showed Up . . .

heresy about Jesus. I stood in the center aisle and quickly opened my

Bible to 1 John 4:1 – 6 and read aloud the section on false spirits sent

into the world by Satan to spew falsehood about Jesus. The crazed

man stopped in his tracks inches before me, breathing heavily.

I raised my hand to pray against the demon in the man and to

ask Jesus to save him. The man turned and sprinted down the center aisle, throwing open two sets of doors on his way out as he ran

into the street screaming.

At first, a number of people in the church thought this was yet

another weird arty skit or object lesson dreamed up by our longhaired public-radio types. But once people looked up to see my face,

it was obvious that this was not a planned event, which caused many

people to be rightfully fearful.

Admittedly, I was a bit freaked out myself. I had been raised

Roman Catholic, met Jesus in college, where I attended a tame Evangelical Free Church, and then moved to Seattle, where I worked

with college students at an independent Bible church. My church

experience had generally taught me that the supernatural craziness

in Acts had ceased and was no longer operating. So I had never seen

anything like this, and no one had ever given me pointers about the

protocol for dealing with a demonized dude in a church ser vice.

My answer to everything is pretty much the same: open the

Bible and preach about the person of Jesus and his mission for our

church. So I skipped my planned sermon from Romans that night

and used the moment to explain the mission of our church.

I told the church that we could view the demon-possessed man

either as our enemy or as our mission. I explained that God had

allowed him to enter our church and exposed his condition in an

effort to break our hearts because our Enemy had enslaved many

people like that young man. Therefore, we needed to be a church

intensely committed to Scripture because it alone was the weapon

that could defeat our Enemy and liberate people. I explained that

we needed to have our hearts broken so that we would weep for the

condition of our city as Jesus wept over Jerusalem. I taught that if

Satan was willing to attack our little church ser vice, it confirmed

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 86

02/03/06 11:44:42 AM

75 – 150 People • 87

that God had us in Seattle for an enormous mission and that the

Enemy was trying to destroy us while we were small, just like Herod

tried to kill Jesus when he was only an infant. I ended by explaining

that in Romans 8:28, God promises to work all things for our good

if we love him, and Genesis 50:20 says that what was meant for evil

will be used by God for good and for the saving of many lives.

I called our people to join in our mission to follow Jesus into war

for the heart of our city and closed in prayer. I wept in front of my

church for the first time as the magnitude of what we were doing hit

me at a level deeper than ever before. I had never opened my eyes

while I prayed before our church, and for the first time, I prayed

with my eyes open because I felt God had opened our eyes that

night. My people had their heads bowed in silence, and it absolutely

broke me to know that these people were entrusted to my leadership and care. I hoped that we had witnessed the first shot of a war

that would end with Jesus standing on the neck of our Enemy in the

middle of our city for everyone to see.

The demonized guy later returned to the church, and Mike and

Lief followed up with him and his unsaved friend. The demonized

young man did not recall what had happened, and his friend said

he had never seen his buddy act like that before and was worried

for him. Mike and Lief shared the gospel with the young men, who

were very spiritually confused, and prayed for them before they

left, never to return again.

The following week, our attendance dropped a bit since the

large number of visitors had been understandably weirded out by

the demonic dude. But those who stayed with us had a new resolve

that the heretics, false teachers, and other problems we had recently

fought through were all Satan’s way of sidetracking us from the simplicity of the gospel but that Jesus had spared us for a great work

in our city. Some people started gathering informally on Sundays

to pray for our church and city. A number of people stopped playing church and started owning our mission to reach our city and

see Jesus transform our culture. The demonic event caused another

buzz to go out about our church, and more people started dropping

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 87

02/03/06 11:44:42 AM

88 • Jesus, Satan Showed Up . . .

in to see what was going on, so we grew back up to around 150

people within a few months.

During the summer, we continued our midweek outdoor Bible

study but moved it to a new park just off a waterway that was heavily

trafficked by boaters. People sat on a grassy area under a large totem

pole, while the band and I stood on a dock. It was a beautiful setting

with boats passing by and the sun setting over Lake Washington.

We baptized new converts in the water while everyone cheered.

The only problem ended up being the boaters. I could not see

what was going on behind me because my back was to the water

while I was teaching. During our first meeting, our people kept

waving at boaters who passed by, which was annoying but kind of

cute. One evening a few weeks into the study, no one was looking at

me while I taught, and everyone had troubled looks on their faces. I

turned around to see a bunch of frat guys with their shorts around

their ankles, mooning my church as what was apparently one of

their dad’s boats passed by. It was tough to preach with a backdrop

of hairy heinies.

A few weeks later, I again noticed that no one was looking at

me while I preached and turned around to see a few well-endowed

young women passing by on a boat, lifting up their shirts like Mardi

Gras princesses as they flashed our Bible study. I used the moment

to say something about choosing the location because of its natural

beauty but not anticipating that much natural beauty and went on

to say something about total depravity and how only in our city

could we be flashed at a Bible study.

Not surprisingly, the Bible study did grow for two main reasons.

First, our people and their friends liked the fact that they could

smoke during the Bible study since it was outdoors. Some people

got saved at the study, including three people who later became deacons and one person who became an elder, all because they could

smoke at church. Two of the people who got saved were a stripper

and her live-in boyfriend, whom I later married on the same dock.

Second, the word got out that there were naked women at our Bible

study, which seemed to be a plus when inviting lost friends.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 88

02/03/06 11:44:42 AM

75 – 150 People • 89

I tried to finish up the Bible study with dignity, planning to

move it to another park the following summer to avoid the naked

hecklers. I thought we had made it through the summer without

any more trauma — until the last week of the summer study. As

I was finishing my message, a boat went by with what looked to

be about half of the church onboard, drinking heavily and yelling

loudly. The boat was driven by the same guy who kept taking our

people to the renegade mystical Catholic Church and the New Age

self-help cult seminars, and he had my secretary with him, which

was, to say the least, troubling. It proved to be the beginning of a

season of dealing with widespread immaturity.

Reformission Reflections

1. What are some of the most bizarre things you have seen in

a church or ministry?

2. How has Satan tried to destroy your church or ministry?

How successful was his plan?

3. Which types of people in the Coaching Corner list are

currently getting the most attention in your church or

ministry?

4. Which type of people in the Coaching Corner list do you

most appreciate? Why? Which do you least appreciate? Why?

5. Without naming names, describe people that come to mind

as illustrations of the various kinds of people listed in the

Coaching Corner.

6. How would you categorize yourself based on the Coaching

Corner list? Are you proud of that, or do you need to make

some life changes?

7. Based on the Coaching Corner list, which kind of person do

you most aspire to be? Why?

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 89

02/03/06 11:44:43 AM

031020755X_relation_fm.qxp 9/8/06 2:21 PM Page 1

This page is intentionally left blank

I was a pothead until I got saved

and now I am the president of the

chamber of commerce and

the executive pastor.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 91

02/03/06 11:44:43 AM

Jesus, Could You Please

Rapture the Charismaniac

Lady Who Brings Her

Tambourine to Church?

150 – 350 People

I swore the young mother was going to pull out a wooden spoon,

put me over her knee, and whoop me right in the middle of our

church ser vice. She apparently lived near the church, and our worship band blaring through our honking speakers woke up her kid

who was napping. At the time, we did not have ushers or greeters to

keep things in order, so the irate mother pushed the stroller right

into our sanctuary, she and her kid both screaming at the top of

their lungs in hellish harmony.

Apparently, we had quickly worn out our welcome in the new

church building nestled among the homes of millionaires. We had

no parking, so our assortment of beater cars and mopeds clogged

all of the previously quiet streets in the neighborhood. Our neighbors particularly appreciated it when, for example, an old Datsun

worth less than the tank of gas in an SUV blocked said SUV in its

driveway.

To make matters worse, some lug nut spray painted “Mars Hill

Rules” on the pristine white church, on the side of the building

that faces the main street, of course. Before long, the police were

regularly being called to tow cars and to cite us for noise violations.

Each time, the cop would show up, wipe the donut glaze off his

face, smile, and check the volume level of our worship ser vice with

92

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 92

02/03/06 11:44:45 AM

150 – 350 People • 93

a noise meter. Not once did he ever find that we had exceeded the

legal noise limit, which is basically equivalent to Metallica playing live in an elevator. We eventually got our own noise meter to

regulate our volume, and we put up signs around the neighborhood

asking our people not to park illegally, which they respected.

By the end of the summer of 1997, we were running anywhere

between 120 and 150 people on Sundays, and the sanctuary was

looking fairly full. We were doing pretty well except for the one

dreadful night we tried out hip-hop worship on a bunch of white

indie rocker kids. Worse still, it was the only night that the very

elderly former secretary of the Presbyterian church that owned the

building dropped in to visit, and she left shaking her head without

making eye contact with me. She kept an office on-site and had

final control over our use of the building. From that point forward,

we got along as pleasantly as a bitterly divorced couple still living

under the same roof.

We survived the horrendous holy hip-hop havoc and expanded

to two Sunday ser vices in time for the fall push, which is when

historically we have seen our biggest attendance increase. Since we

still could not find a Sunday morning location, we decided to split

our 6:00 p.m. ser vice into two ser vices, one at 5:00 p.m. and one at

7:00 p.m.

In his “Rule of 150,” Malcolm Gladwell states that the highest

number of people the average person can connect with is 150.1 This

helps explain why many groups cease growing at that number. For

example, the Methodist movement of John Wesley collected people

into communities of about 150.2 In twenty-one hunter-gatherer

societies, the average village had 148.4 people.3 Most military fighting units are under 200, and Hutterite communities grow no larger

than 150 by design.4 Therefore, any congregation committed to

evangelism and the expansion of its ministry should expect to find

it difficult to grow beyond this number.

When I told our people that we were going to grow beyond

150 people and expand to two ser vices, some of them freaked out.

The most common complaint was that we would no longer have

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 93

02/03/06 11:44:46 AM

94 • Jesus, Could You Please Rapture the Charismaniac Lady . . .

real community because people attending different ser vices would

never meet. What they were really saying is that they wanted to be

a small community and not a large community of multiple smaller

communities.

I explained to them that in Acts 1 the early church was about our

size and was meeting together with great unity and gladness. Then

in Acts 2, the Holy Spirit dropped on Pentecost, 3,000 people were

saved, and they never again met as a little church of 120 people in

the upper room. I explained that if the early church had the same

attitude that our church had, the gospel would not have spread and

we would have never heard about Jesus. I made it clear that limiting the size of the church for our convenience was a sin and that we

should be a church that always exists more for the people who are

not yet saved than for the people who are.

Because our people had grown to increasingly trust the Scriptures and our mission, they went along with the change to two services. In doing so, they were repenting of their selfishness, and God

honored their repentance. In retrospect, I believe this was one of

the most important moments in the history of our church because

we were deciding if Mars Hill Church was to be defined by the size

of its mission to reach the lost or by the number of people we could

gather at one time in one room.

I can still remember how nervous I was on the first week of our

big transition. Would people all go to one ser vice and leave the

other empty? Would we lose people by eliminating the 6:00 p.m.

ser vice they were accustomed to? Thankfully, the attendance split

evenly between the two ser vices, and we jumped up to about 160

people immediately. Through this, I learned that when you give

people more options, more of them opt, and growth happens.

At that time, I preached what I think was my first decent sermon

series because it was very practical and I had finally started to learn

how to connect every passage of Scripture to Jesus. Our church was

still nearly all college students and singles, with a few young married couples and families with small children mixed in. I assumed

the students and singles were all pretty horny, so I went out on a

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 94

02/03/06 11:44:46 AM

150 – 350 People • 95

limb and preached through the Song of Songs in the fall. I printed

up a nice lengthy introduction to the book, with a lot of information about sex and marriage. Each week I handed out sermon notes

with commentary on the book.

The Bible simply tells us to “preach the Word” (2 Tim. 4:2) and

does not tell us exactly how this should be done. Occasionally we do

see Jesus preaching very long sermons (Matt. 15:29 – 32), as well as

Paul (Acts 20:7 – 11). But we do not have transcripts of their sermons

to see exactly what was said.

We know from church history that such influential preachers

as Justin Martyr preached expository sermons that went through

books of the Bible line by line. At Mars Hill, we occasionally preach

topics that need to be addressed, but the majority of the preaching

simply goes through books of the Bible chapter by chapter and verse

by verse, rotating between Old and New Testament books as God

leads. The key, however, is to move through the Bible books fairly

quickly rather than lingering forever in a book by drilling down on

every word to the degree that the people in the church lose sight of

the overarching mega-themes and purposes of the book.

I believe preaching through books of the Bible is beneficial for a

number of reasons. First, it is important for Chris tians to learn all of

Scripture and not just topics. Second, it is important for Chris tians

to learn how to study a book of the Bible and how God inspired

it to be organized and interconnected. Third, with so many new

believers and non-Chris tians visiting Mars Hill, it is important that

we teach in a way that allows them to follow along without getting

lost as they try to jump around in their Bibles. Fourth, because all

Scripture is God-breathed and for our benefit, there is not a page

of Scripture that is not helpful to our faith, so we should examine

it all. Fifth, going through books of the Bible forces us to examine

tough and controversial issues that we may otherwise ignore. Sixth,

because our people easily connect with narrative teaching styles,

a biblical and narrative teaching of the Bible most easily connects

with their learning style as long as the Bible is presented as one unified story with Jesus as the hero.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 95

02/03/06 11:44:46 AM

96 • Jesus, Could You Please Rapture the Charismaniac Lady . . .

Each sermon on the Song of Songs took more than an hour and

began a trend of long sermons that sometimes creep to an hour and a

half or more. Each week I extolled the virtues of marriage, foreplay,

oral sex, sacred stripping, and sex outdoors, just as the book teaches,

because all Scripture is indeed profitable. I was frank but not crass

and did not back away from any of the tough issues regarding sex

and pleasure. This helped us a lot because apparently a pastor using

words like “penis” and “oral sex” is unusual, and before you could

say “aluminum pole in the bedroom,” attendance began to climb

steadily to more than two hundred people a week. Additionally, a

lot of people got engaged, and young wives started showing up with

big baby bellies, a trend that has continued unabated ever since.

After much work and many mistakes, we had finally grown to the

adolescent phase of church.5

A buzz got out about our church, and Chris tian pastors and leaders

from around the country and the world began dropping in to check

out what we were doing. One such person was a young unknown

author named Donald Miller, who came to visit us from Portland. He

seemed to like what we were doing and asked if we had any churches

in Portland. He was a really nice guy struggling to make ends meet

running a small publishing company out of his apartment.

Eventually a young pastor named Rick McKinley, who has

become a very dear friend, planted a church in Portland for our

Adolescence is achieved after the long and painful season of doing the

hard work it takes to get a church functioning with healthy systems, competent leaders, and clear expectations of people. This season is marked

by a number of critical beginnings, such as getting the wrong people out

of the church and getting the right people to commit to the church and to

doing whatever it takes to accomplish the mission. Getting to this phase

is exhausting, and if the leaders’ plans fail, they lose credibility and the

church settles into a lethargic state of decline.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 96

02/03/06 11:44:46 AM

150 – 350 People • 97

Acts 29 Network, and Donald helped him get it started. The church

is doing great, and so is Donald. His book Blue Like Jazz has taken

off as the cult classic for young emerging Chris tians.6 When it first

came out, I was told that he had written about my involvement in his

life, and I was filled with great pride to know that I had been noted

in such a popular book. I grabbed a copy and thumbed through it to

find that I’m only mentioned in a few sentences as Mark the cussing

pastor. Yet again I felt like Charlie Brown trying to get his foot on

the ball to no avail, but I still love Don nonetheless and won’t cuss

him out.

Around the time that other pastors began visiting us, I was

invited to speak at my first pastors’ conference, hosted by Leadership Network, at the Mount Hermon Conference Center in northern California. The topic was the then trendy and now embarrassing

Generation X ministry. The speakers at the conference included

Dieter Zander, who was at Willow Creek at the time trying to do

something cool for young people, and Chris Seay, who was leading

University Baptist Church in Texas. Chris has gone on to write

a number of books and has become something of an icon in the

emerging church.7

The worship leader for the conference was a skinny, hillbillylooking young man whom Chris had been training, named David

Crowder, who has gone on to write some worship songs that are

very popular among emerging churches.8 Dan Kimball, who later

wrote The Emerging Church as well as other books, picked me up at

the airport, sporting his cool rockabilly hairdo, and drove me to the

conference.9

I had never been to a pastors’ conference and was a bit worried

about what I was supposed to do. When I got there, I was relieved to

see that it was attended mainly by clueless young high-fiving white

guys with facial hair, like me.

In college I had studied philosophy under a Chris tian professor who did his thesis on Descartes and modern understandings

of truth and knowledge. He got me reading philosophy, which led

to a lengthy multiyear study of the transition from the modern to

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 97

02/03/06 11:44:47 AM

98 • Jesus, Could You Please Rapture the Charismaniac Lady . . .

the postmodern world.10 Because I was familiar with the growing

curiosity about postmodernism, I spoke on these subjects. I titled

my session “The Flight from God,” which I stole from existential

philosopher Max Picard’s book by the same name.11

That message reportedly outsold any conference tape at Mount

Hermon that year. And it shifted the conversation from reaching

Generation X to the emerging mission of reaching postmodern culture. I was not prepared for the media onslaught that came shortly

thereafter. Before I knew it, National Public Radio was interviewing

me, Mother Jones magazine did a feature on our church, Pat Robertson’s 700 Club gave me a plaque for being America’s “Church of the

Week” and did a television story on us, other media outlets started

asking for interviews, large denominations were asking me to be a

consultant despite the fact that I wasn’t exactly sure what a consultant was, and conferences were calling and asking me to speak as an

expert on things I did not know.

The church still was not paying me, so I was living off of outside

support from another church. I was not making enough money to

pull my wife out of work and start our family. So I started traveling a lot to speak at various conferences, hoping to help serve other

Chris tian leaders and supplement my income.

Pretty soon Leadership Network hired a young pastor named

Doug Pagitt, who later went on to help found the Emergent Network, to organize what they were calling the Young Leaders Network.12 Our small team of young pastors started getting more media

attention, more speaking opportunities, and even book offers from

major Chris tian publishers. Before long, another pastor was added

to our Young Leaders team who was a few years younger than my

dad, which did not seem like a young leader. But he was genuinely

nice. His name was Brian McLaren, and he has gone on to become

a very successful writer with some very stimulating views and

opinions.13 And though I sincerely love Brian and appreciate the

kindness he has shown me, I generally disagree with many of his

theological conclusions. Because he comes from a pacifistic Brethren background, such things as power and violence greatly trouble

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 98

02/03/06 11:44:47 AM

150 – 350 People • 99

him. His pacifism seems to underlie many of our theological disagreements since he has a hard time accepting such things as the

violence of penal substitutionary atonement, parts of the Old Testament where God killed people, and the concept of conscious eternal

torment in hell. Curiously, it is also Brian’s pacifism that makes him

such a warmly engaging person who is able to speak and write about

theologically controversial issues while being gracious. Ironically,

my love for and disagreement with Brian are both borne out of his

pacifism. But I find it curious that, from my perspective, he is using

his power as a writer and speaker to do violence to Scripture in the

name of pacifism.

I was not accustomed to the traveling or to the evangelical subculture that I was thrust into. I would travel during the week to

speak or consult and then hurry home in time to preach at our two

growing church ser vices. I quickly got burned-out, angry, and frustrated. Additionally, I was spiritually immature and would vent my

anger from the stage, cussing people out and acting like a jerk on

more than one occasion. Then the team of young pastors started

raising questions about the sovereignty of God, God’s knowledge

of the future, calling God “she” instead of “he,” whether Jesus died

as a substitute for our sin, and some other crazy stuff that just made

me angry. I felt that I was wasting my time arguing with young pastors over stuff that was clear to me in the Bible, I was not helping

anyone by having a foul mouth and bad attitude, I was neglecting

my wife, and I was not doing a good job of building my church into

more than a cool event.

Within a few years, the Young Leaders Network disbanded and

emerged briefly as the Terra Nova Project, led by Brian McLaren,

Doug Pagitt, Tony Jones, and Andrew Jones. On the front page of

their first Terra Nova website, they thanked Chris Seay and me

for founding the movement, which made me uneasy because I did

not want to be associated with the theological direction the movement was taking, though they were personally nice guys. Though

it was hard to part company with these men, I believe that conviction must override community, and we were not theologically like0310270162_confess_rev.indd 99

02/03/06 11:44:47 AM

100 • Jesus, Could You Please Rapture the Charismaniac Lady . . .

minded. The Terra Nova Project disbanded before long, and the

Emergent Village replaced it.14

Back at my church, as the two evening ser vices started to fill up,

our attendance began bouncing somewhere in the 220 to 250 range

on Sundays. I thought we were ready to launch an off-site ser vice

near the University of Washington. We had wanted to be close to

the campus since the beginning of the church but had not been

able to find a place to meet in that area. But now an opportunity

opened up to start a 9:00 p.m. Sunday ser vice next to the campus at

a Vineyard church. Lief did not think it was a good idea, but I was

convinced that we were on a roll and that I could pull it off.

So I grabbed one of our punk-rock worship teams that had

recently come together, with Matt drumming, Jeff, who had been

the front man for a punk band called 90 Pound Wuss, and a college student named Luke singing and playing guitar. They have

remained with our church ever since as the worship team humorously called Team Strikeforce. I also grabbed a few young college

students who wanted to go into ministry, expecting I could use the

experience to train them.

But the new church ser vice absolutely flopped, for many reasons. First, the event was alright, but I did not put together a core

of missionaries and arrogantly thought people would just show up

to the event because it was cool. Second, the punk worship band

was incredible but did not fit the acoustic-guitar-Dave-Matthews loving, Gap-wearing, frat-guy college scene. Third, drunk homeless guys kept wandering in and yelling at me about everything

from UFOs to wheat bread while I tried to preach. Fourth, a few of

the more peculiar people from the Vineyard church started showing up. Among them was an older woman who always wore purple

because it is the biblical color of royalty, brought a praise flag, and

carried a tambourine with ribbons flowing from it to jump on stage

and play with the punk band as the Spirit led. One night I put my

face in my hands during worship, asking Jesus to rapture her immediately. Fifth, 9:00 p.m. was obviously too late for a church ser vice

unless we were hosting a Vampires for Christ meeting.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 100

02/03/06 11:44:47 AM

150 – 350 People • 101

I had failed to think missionally about who we would reach out

with, who we would reach out to, or how we would reach out. Instead,

I had wrongly thought only attractionally, believing that if I had a

good band and I preached a good sermon, we could put together a

good event that would attract lots of people all by itself. So I failed

miserably. As this train wreck of a church ser vice rolled along for

a few months, it became painfully clear that I had no choice but to

pull the plug and pronounce the death sentence.

To tell the truth, this was a shot to my dignity because I thought

I could make it work and am not a guy who has failed very often in

his life. In hindsight, I think God let the failure sting because he

wanted me to learn to always do both missional and attractional

ministry and not repeat this mistake again.

During this season, my wife, Grace, also started to experience

a lot of serious medical problems. Her job was very stressful, and

between her long hours at the office and long hours at the church,

her body started breaking down. I felt tremendously convicted that

I had sinned against my wife and had violated the spirit of 1 Timothy 5:8, which says that if a man does not provide for his family, he has denied his faith and has acted in a manner worse than

that of an unbeliever. I repented to Grace for my sin of not making

enough money and having her shoulder any of the financial burden

for our family. We did not yet have elders installed in the church

but did have an advisory council in place, and I asked them for a

small monthly stipend to help us make ends meet, and I supplemented our income with outside support and an occasional speaking engagement.

Shortly thereafter, Grace gave birth to our first child, my sweetie

pie Ashley. Up to this point, Grace had continuously poured endless

hours into the church. She taught a women’s Bible study, mentored

many young women, oversaw hospitality on Sundays, coordinated

meals for new moms recovering from birth, and organized all of the

bridal and baby showers. Grace’s dad had planted a church before

she was born and has remained there for more than forty years. Her

heart for ministry and willingness to serve was amazing. But as our

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 101

02/03/06 11:44:47 AM

102 • Jesus, Could You Please Rapture the Charismaniac Lady . . .

church grew, I felt I was losing my wife because we were both putting so many hours into the church that we were not connecting as

a couple like we should have. I found myself getting bitter against

her because she would spend her time caring for our child and caring for our church but was somewhat negligent of me.

I explained to Grace that her primary ministry was to me, our

child, and the management of our home and that I needed her to

pull back from the church work to focus on what mattered most.

She resisted a bit at first, shed a few tears, but in time realized that I

took care of the church but no one took care of me but her. And the

best thing she could do for the church was to make sure that we had

a good marriage and godly children as an example for other people

in the church to follow. It was the first time that I remember actually admitting my need for help to anyone. It was tough. But I feared

that if we did not put our marriage and children above the demands

of the church, we would end up with the lukewarm, distant marriage that so many pastors have because they treat their churches as

mistresses that they are more passionate about than their brides.

As I began putting my home in order, I was also convicted that I

had not yet put the church in order. Because we were meeting in the

evenings, we started to see an increase in double-dipping churchgoers. They would attend their church in the morning and then

drop in on our evening ser vice because it was different and at least

mildly cool. So we were growing in numbers but not in leaders or

givers. The church was increasingly becoming simply an event that

only a handful of people served at or gave to.

Although I was frustrated with both my wife and church, I had

to own the fact that they both were under my leadership and that

I had obviously done a poor job of organizing things to function

efficiently. And since we did not yet have elders formally in place,

there was no one to stop me from implementing dumb ideas like the

9:00 p.m. church ser vice. So I decided to come to firmer convictions on church government and structure so that I could establish

the founding framework for what our church leadership would look

like. I spent hundreds of hours studying Scripture and church his0310270162_confess_rev.indd 102

02/03/06 11:44:48 AM

150 – 350 People • 103

tory and meeting with pastors from multiple theological traditions

to hear their case and test it with Scripture. Some day I hope to

write a thorough biblical and practical book on church leadership,

but for the purposes of this book, I will briefly explain and practically critique the three most popular ecclesiological options and

leave the theological heavy lifting for another time.

First I studied congregational ecclesiology, which is illustrated

below.

Congregational Ecclesiology

Congregation

Staff

Pastor

In congregational ecclesiology, the congregation holds the highest authority in the church. Practically, this means that the congregation votes on church matters and that some form of majority

rules, basically like a democracy. The entire concept seems to be

taken from a secular volunteer organization that is run by volunteers but hires a small staff and a full-time director to run the dayto-day operations.

The staff and pastor are essentially seen as employees of the

congregation, to be fired if they do not meet the expectations of

their employer, the congregation. As I studied the Bible, I found

more warrant for a church led by unicorns than by majority vote.

Practically, it seemed obvious that a congregationally governed

church would not be led but would instead make decisions by

compromise to appease all of the various interests in the church.

Moreover, it has been proven statistically that while congregationally governed churches tend to have longevity, they cannot grow

very large because they lack a clear leader. And the thought of all of

our young, newly saved, chain-smoking, unemployed porn addicts

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 103

02/03/06 11:44:48 AM

104 • Jesus, Could You Please Rapture the Charismaniac Lady . . .

outvoting me on Jesus’ will for our church sounded like the lunatics

taking over the asylum. So I dismissed the congregational government option rather quickly.

I then explored the senior pastor ecclesiology option. In this

model, the senior pastor is God’s specially anointed man and functions as the highest authority in the church. Under the senior pastor

is a staff that works for the pastor and is supposed to implement his

vision for his church. The people in the congregation are the customers to be taken care of by the pastor and his staff.

Senior Pastor Ecclesiology

Pastor

Staff

Congregation

The senior pastor model borrows its organizational structure

from corporate business, with a CEO, employees, and customers.

Churches using this model have the potential to grow large quickly

because they have simple and decisive leadership with only one senior

leader. But they are also prone to make big mistakes since no one is

able to stop a dumb idea or heretical doctrine if it comes from the

senior pastor. And since the senior pastor is functionally not submissive or accountable to anyone, the church is very vulnerable to sin

by the senior pastor, particularly sexual sin. In addition to not seeing this model as biblical, I also thought that, on a practical level, I

would be putting my family and my church in danger if I was the solo

senior leader because, to destroy the church, Satan would only need

for me to commit an egregious sin or get hit by a car. So I rejected

the senior pastor ecclesiology as both unbiblical and unwise.

I then began to study elder ecclesiology, which is what I had

basically believed to be right since I first read the Bible as a new

Chris tian. I found many things that I appreciated about the elder0310270162_confess_rev.indd 104

02/03/06 11:44:48 AM

150 – 350 People • 105

governed model, including the principle of a team of senior leaders

that were mutually submissive. Theologically, this made sense to

me because it seemed more Trinitarian with a leadership community and took into account that pastors are capable of making simple

mistakes and big sins just like everyone else and therefore need the

insights and accountability of other qualified elders.

Elder Ecclesiology

Senior

Pastor

Elders

Staff

Congregation

I was disappointed, however, when I inspected elder-governed

churches because they did not operate as a team of equals with a

first-among-equals leader like I saw in the New Testament. Instead,

a strong senior pastor still sat as the highest seat of authority in the

church. The elders did function as peers of the senior pastor at the

churches I investigated. But they were mainly unpaid volunteers

who were good businessmen. They were generally godly but were

not skilled pastors. They tended to function well in this system

because it was much like the corporate business structure they were

accustomed to, with a CEO, a board of directors, employees, and

customers. But rather than functioning as fellow pastors with the

senior pastor, they instead functioned more like a corporate board

that approved the plans brought to them by the senior pastor and

gave generously to help underwrite fundraising.

Under the elder board that focused on business were staff members who were recognized as pastors but not as elders. This did not

make sense because the Bible uses the words interchangeably (e.g.,

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 105

02/03/06 11:44:48 AM

106 • Jesus, Could You Please Rapture the Charismaniac Lady . . .

Acts 20:28 – 29; 1 Peter 5:1 – 2). The staff pastors generally knew the

Bible, the people in the church, and the day-to-day needs of the

church far better than the men on the elder board who were leading them and making decisions they were supposed to implement.

This often leads to great frustration between staff members and

elder boards that are out of touch with what is really happening in

the church.

As I considered these three options from a missional perspective, it seemed obvious to me that these models all shared numerous

flaws. Among them are the following problems:

Jesus did not make the church organizational chart.

They are patterned after various kinds of secular organizations.

They have no gospel or theological convictions.

They do not have a mission outside the church and do not

consider lost people.

They do not take into account any surrounding cultural

engagement.

They are simply arguing over leading from the top down

through authority or from the bottom up through ser vice.

They bog down from either too much hierarchy or too little

leadership.

They are static organizational structures that are not moving

on a mission.

Seeking a better alternative, I then read Rick Warren’s book The

Purpose-Driven Church, which has become one of the most popular

books ever written for pastors.15 In this book, Warren teaches an

entirely new way to organize a church, which is illustrated on the

next page.

In the Purpose-Driven ecclesiology, the goal is to move as many

people as possible into leadership at the center of the church. This is

accomplished by having various classes to train people for ministry

and to prepare them to become more vitally invested in the church.

The Purpose-Driven model had some of the same flaws as the other

models, with four major positive exceptions: (1) It moved Chris tians

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 106

02/03/06 11:44:48 AM

150 – 350 People • 107

in the church from being customers served by their pastor to being

ministers serving according to their spiritual gifts. (2) It shifted the

duty of the pastor(s) from doing ministry for Chris tians to training

Chris tians to do the ministry, as Ephesians 4:11 – 13 teaches. (3) It

finally put lost people on the church organizational chart and had

the church existing for them and not just for the Chris tians already

in the church. (4) It put the mission of evangelism at the forefront

of the church.

The changes brought about by Warren are revolutionary and

very important. His ecclesiology has become the standard for the

contemporary and evangelical church. God has used Warren’s

insights to bring untold numbers of people to Jesus, and Warren

has become one of the most important Chris tians in our generation. Sadly, there was a time when, as an arrogant young punk, I was

critical of his work. But after connecting with Warren a few times, I

have found him to be a good man who loves Jesus, works hard, and

is just trying to make a difference. If anyone buys my book, maybe

some young punk will talk trash about me in a few years, and then

I’ll know I’ve done something important enough to be criticized

too. So I appreciate Warren’s contribution to the larger church and

Purpose-Driven Ecclesiology

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 107

02/03/06 11:44:48 AM

108 • Jesus, Could You Please Rapture the Charismaniac Lady . . .

believe his work is the most effective church growth strategy for

the kind of people who are best reached by the contemporary and

evangelical church.

As I continued to study, however, I did not believe that any of

the ecclesiological options that I studied would be the most effective structure for the mission of an urban emerging and evangelical

church like ours. God clearly spoke to me as a new Chris tian and

told me to plant a church in Seattle that focused on reaching young

men. But Seattle is among the least likely cities in the nation where

a young man would attend church. It was obvious that they would

not simply come to church on their own and that if we truly wanted

to grow, we would need to be structured differently than all of the

churches in the city who had not successfully reached young, creative, and urban secular men.

Around this time, I became acquainted with the Gospel and Our

Culture Network (GOCN).16 This network is a denominational

think tank of sorts wrestling with what it means to do missions in

America. One of the leaders, Dr. George Hunsberger, taught at a

conference we hosted in Seattle for Leadership Network. About one

hundred young pastors and leaders attended, and his insights were

very helpful. I also met another member of the GOCN, Alan Roxburgh, who is a really good thinker from Canada. In a few pages of

one of his books, he articulates many of the concerns about church

structures that I shared above and provides the beginnings of an

alternative.17 I began wrestling with his basic concept and came up

with the following emerging and missional ecclesiology, which has

governed our church ever since.

Emerging and Missional Ecclesiology

Attractional

Ministries

Gospel

Father Son Spirit

Elders

Deacons

Members

Class

Missional

Ministries

Kingdom

Culture

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 108

02/03/06 11:44:49 AM

150 – 350 People • 109

The emerging and missional ecclesiology has the following

elements:

The Trinitarian God is the source and model of loving

community.

The Trinitarian God rules over the church and culture as Lord

over all so that ministry extends far beyond the church and

into culture.

Jesus mediates between the church on earth and God the

Father in heaven.

Jesus is the Senior Pastor to be followed by the power of the

Holy Spirit.

The church has two simultaneous missions: going out into

culture (missional ministry) and bringing people into God’s

kingdom, of which the church is an outpost (attractional

ministry).

A clear gospel thread binds everyone and everything together

on Jesus’ mission.

The structure is rooted in biblical theology, not secular

organizational theory.

The church exists to welcome and convert lost people.

The church labors to be as culturally accessible to lost people

as possible.

The church has leaders but is not organized by hierarchy.

Elders are a qualified team of male pastors who are playercoaches both leading the church and training people for

ministry.

Deacons are qualified male and female pastoral associates.

Members are church leaders who give their money, ser vice,

prayers, and time to the advancement of the gospel and

submit to discipline if needed.

The Gospel Class is the filter through which the wrong people

are weeded out of the church and the right people are

welcomed into the church as members.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 109

02/03/06 11:44:49 AM

110 • Jesus, Could You Please Rapture the Charismaniac Lady . . .

As I became convinced that the ecclesiological structure I had

settled on was biblical, I then implemented it. The details of that

process will require another book, so here I will simply hit the main

points.

As Jesus did when selecting his disciples, I started by prayerfully

asking God the Father which men he wanted to be chosen as leaders. I then sought out men who had expressed a desire to become

elders, were already functioning as pastors in the church, and met

the biblical criteria. I also looked up their financial giving to the

church because Jesus taught that our money follows our heart, and

I wanted to see if these men were truly with me on the mission to

build our church. It was encouraging to see that each of these men

was giving more time and more money to the church than anyone

else gave, because they loved the Lord and our church as much as

anyone else we had.

We began meeting together in a weekly Bible study. We studied the Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Tim othy, Titus) as well as some

other books that were assigned reading. As we studied, it became

clear that these men would be a good team. Practically, I considered

them peers and the kind of men that I hoped one day my sons would

become and my daughters would marry. Additionally, by getting to

know their wives and families well, I was convinced that they were

the kind of families that I wanted to be the examples in our church

for others to emulate, as Hebrews 13:7 teaches.

I also did a great deal of biblical and historical research on women

in ministry. Again, the findings could fill an entire book, but to

keep things brief, I will simply lean over the plate and take one for

my team that, like Jesus did, only appoints men to the highest position of spiritual leadership. After hundreds of hours of study, I felt

convinced that a complementarian position was the most biblical, as

the following chart illustrates.18

As the elder candidates finished their training and testing process, I preached a series on how we were going to organize our

church. One Sunday I brought our first elder team before the church

to officially install them as pastors. Since we are an independent

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 110

02/03/06 11:44:49 AM

150 – 350 People • 111

Egalitarian

Complementarian

Hierarchical

(liberal)

(moderate)

(conservative)

Men and women are

All church ministries

Women and men are

partners together in

are open to qualified

created to operate

every arena of ministry.

men and women, with

in different spheres

All ministries and offices the singular exception

of church ministry.

in the church are open

of elder-pastor, which is Women cannot be

to all qualified men and

only open to qualified

elders or deacons, serve

women. Gender does

men. Women can

communion, teach men,

not exclude any person

be deacons, teach,

lead worship, or speak

from any church office.

lead worship, serve

in the church ser vice.

communion, and be in

Women can only build

full-time paid ministry.

ministries for women

and children.

Priority texts: Judges 4; Priority texts: Same

Priority texts: Genesis

Acts 16:11 – 15; 18:26;

as hierarchical,

1:27; 2:18; 3:16 – 17;

Luke 8:1 – 3; Romans

with an emphasis on

1 Co rin thi ans 11:3,

16:1 – 3, 6 – 7, 12;

1 Tim othy 3:11 and

8 – 9; 1 Tim othy

Galatians 3:28

Romans 16:1 – 2

2:11 – 3:13

church, we also ordained each of the seven men (including myself),

with our church serving as the licensing organization, kind of like

the scene in the movie The Apostle where Robert Duvall, who plays

the role of the pastor, baptizes himself as an apostle.

The elders were a great assistance to me because they picked

up a lot of the pastoral work, such as leading small groups, teaching classes, counseling, and developing leaders. The elders put in

enough time that it was equivalent to having at least two more fulltime pastors on staff. This allowed me to pull back a bit from working in the church and spend more time working on the church.

Because the giving was still poor, I was the only paid pastor on staff,

and most of my income still came from outside the church.

With elders in place, I could focus on building church membership. This was absolutely essential to our survival since people

had come into the church with different agendas, theological convictions, levels of commitment, and missions. I needed to create a

filter to get the wrong people out of the church and keep the right

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 111

02/03/06 11:44:49 AM

112 • Jesus, Could You Please Rapture the Charismaniac Lady . . .

people in the church. I then needed to explain to our people what

they needed to do for our church to stay on mission. So I developed

a class that has had a few names over the years but is now called the

Gospel Class.

The Gospel Class is a series of Bible studies that I taught to

ground our people in our essential doctrines and missiology, much

of which is included in this book. I did not want anyone to hold a

leadership position, teach, join a small group, or receive any training in a class until they had first completed the Gospel Class and

signed a covenant agreement with the elders that was very serious

and demanded a lot from the church members. Though it may

sound harsh, I did not want our church to invest time and energy

into people who were not on our mission.

The first incarnation of the Gospel Class met in my home, and

I taught all of the lessons to about a dozen people. Before long, one

of the other elders was also teaching a class of about a dozen people

in his home. As people completed the class, they were encouraged

to either sign up as members or leave the church and go elsewhere.

I wanted a church filled with missionaries, Chris tians who were

learning how to become missionaries, and lost people. I would not

accept a church filled with Chris tians who did not give, serve, or

reach lost people, because they invariably make themselves and

their selfish desires the mission of a church and kill innovation and

momentum.

From its inception, anywhere from one-quarter to one-half of

the people who begin the Gospel Class each quarter do not become

members, for reasons ranging from doctrinal differences to not

wanting to meet our membership demands. The class has run every

quarter since it began.

Once we had members, the elders then began tracking their

financial giving twice a year to ensure that our members were supporting their church. I was horrified to discover that most of the

people I had previously considered committed had not been giving

anything until they became members. Even more horrifying was

learning this about the richest person in our church, who was mak0310270162_confess_rev.indd 112

02/03/06 11:44:50 AM

150 – 350 People • 113

ing a few hundred thousand dollars a year and who was also one of

the most vocal and visible people in the church. This person had

given only a few hundred dollars the previous year. Conversely, a

high school girl who worked part-time at an ice-cream shop had

given more money than this person who wanted to be a leader over

her.

Our people were generally very young and very poor. I knew that

unless everyone gave, we would never make ends meet because we

did not have a sugar daddy to bail us out. So we started asking members for annual giving pledges, tracked their giving, and contacted

them if their giving was significantly below their pledge.19 Our attitude in making the calls was not accusatory but rather inquisitive.

The elders who made the calls simply asked if everything was okay,

assuming that the members who were not giving had a viable reason. Most of them said that they had lost a job or had been hit with

an unforeseen major expense such as a medical crisis, so we ended

up praying for them and giving out benevolence support to those in

need. For those who were just sinning by not giving, we asked them

to kindly do their part, and they did.

Once the members were in place, we then began holding home

Bible studies and theology classes for training and had a more

faithful base of people serving. In general, people stepped up and

took ownership of our church and its mission. The financial giving improved enough that I was able to start supporting my family

with only my church salary as my outside support dried up. We

improved our sound equipment and got some computers and telephones to expand the office at the church we were renting.

We then put unpaid deacons in place, who began building new

ministries. The deacons reorganized the children’s ministry and

church ser vice details, provided meals for new moms, held bridal

showers and baby showers, began a prayer ministry, and created a

nice updated website.

Our two ser vices were filling up as our attendance climbed to

more than three hundred people, and it felt like things were finally

maturing and coming together, just in time to fall apart again.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 113

02/03/06 11:44:50 AM

114 • Jesus, Could You Please Rapture the Charismaniac Lady . . .

Reformission Reflections

1. Does the community surrounding your church or ministry

view you warmly or coldly? Why?

2. How well does your church or ministry take care of the pastor

and his family? Are they paid well, respected, and encouraged?

Is there anything else that should be done for them?

3. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being poor and 10 being

excellent, how well are people learning about Jesus from the

Bible through the preaching and teaching in your church or

ministry?

4. Is your church or ministry led more like a congregational,

senior pastor, Purpose-Driven, or emerging and missional

ministry?

5. Are you personally in favor of an egalitarian, complementarian,

or hierchical view of women in ministry? What verses from

Scripture do you have to support your position?

6. Is your church or ministry in favor of an egalitarian,

complementarian, or hierarchical view of women in ministry?

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 114

02/03/06 11:44:50 AM

I was not a Christian when

I came to the church.

Today I am a pastor.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 115

02/03/06 11:44:50 AM

Jesus, Why Am I Getting

Fatter and Meaner?

350 – 1,000 People

It was not a happy time. It was the fall of 1999, just after the shootings at Columbine High School and just before Americans were

spinning like tops over the end of the world, which was supposed

to be brought on by the Y2K bug. Thankfully, Seattle grunge had

nearly run its course, and the local thrift stores were filled with

used flannel shirts and boots. Tragically, grunge was replaced with

happy-clappy, half-naked teenage girls, like Christina Aguilera and

Britney Spears, and boy bands that danced and still had the audacity to claim they were heterosexual. More than Y2K, it was the rise

of the teeny-bop pop that caused me to think the end of the world

might indeed be imminent.

Our little church was rolling along rather nicely. We had settled

into our rented church and had grown to nearly 350 people a week.

In fall, I started preaching through the book of Exodus. We also

changed our worship ser vice to include communion every week

and put most of the congregational singing after the sermon as a

response to the hearing of God’s Word through the preaching. We

felt free to do so because no commanded order of a church ser vice

is to be found anywhere in Scripture, nor is any detailed example of

a worship ser vice from the first-century church. Scripture nowhere

requires a fixed order for church ser vices but simply teaches that

things should be done in a way that is “fitting and orderly” and that

reveres God (1 Cor. 14:40; Heb. 12:28).

Churches ser vices commonly last approximately one hour or

less. Churches wanting to have short ser vices must therefore choose

116

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 116

02/03/06 11:44:53 AM

350 – 1,000 People • 117

between singing songs, partaking of communion, praying, and

preaching. Most churches virtually, if not entirely, omit at least one

of these four major aspects of worship for the sake of time. Mars

Hill began with only a few songs, a sermon, and monthly communion but over the years has grown to include each of the four

major aspects of a worship ser vice. Because of this, our worship

ser vice takes up to two hours and is an event that people simply

make time for, not unlike a big concert or movie. We made the

sermon the hinge for the ser vice, with time for repentance, giving,

communion, and most of the congregational singing following the

sermon to provide people an opportunity to process God’s Word

and respond to his initiation in their lives.

It felt good to be making progress and to settle into a groove

with good momentum. We were forming our own identity, people

were coming to faith in Jesus, young people were getting married,

babies were being born, our financial state was climbing out of the

toilet, and for the first time in our church history, I was actually

feeling happy and hopeful.

Then came that Monday.

On that Monday, I was told via letter that the building had been

sold and some other church was evicting us, effective immediately.

We had only days to leave the premises and take all of our things

with us. I can still remember reading the letter over and over in

utter disbelief.

We lost our offices.

We lost our worship space.

We lost our midweek class space.

We lost our band practice space.

We had nowhere to meet for church ser vices the following

week.

We had no idea where we would go or what we would do.

To make matters worse, our office had been broken into and

our computer with our database was stolen the week before we were

evicted. We could not even notify our people, via phone, mail, or

email, that we were homeless.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 117

02/03/06 11:44:53 AM

118 • Jesus, Why Am I Getting Fatter . . .

And the new building owner kicked us out of our office, which

meant we had no phone for people to even call us to find out where

we were moving to. Amidst our move, the phone company went on

strike, and it was over a month before we had a phone number of

any kind. Our church simply vanished without a trace.

On Tuesday I still had no idea where we were going to meet for

church the following Sunday. I had twenty-four hours to find a new

place to meet because I was scheduled to leave town on Wednesday

to speak at a conference out of state. In desperation, I attended my

first citywide pastors’ meeting, which a large church downtown was

hosting. Every pastor at the meeting was at least as old as my dad,

and most were wearing suits that did not really fit well around the

middle. I anticipated this and intentionally wore a shirt with buttons and tried to just stay quiet in hopes that they would think I was

legit. Eventually they asked for prayer requests, and I said I needed

one of them to let me use their building on Sunday nights for an

indefinite period of time at no charge, beginning in five days.

The pastor hosting the meeting kindly offered to let us use his

church for free on Sunday nights. He then walked me into the sanctuary. The room sat over one thousand people. It was so big that

we would fit in it like a toddler fits in his father’s clothing. The

acoustics worked well for a choir but were death for a hard-rock

worship team. The building was at least thirty minutes from our

old location, in the middle of downtown, and was surrounded by

panhandlers and drunks, who peed on the church. We took the

pastor up on his offer because it was better than meeting outside in

a park in the rain, which was our only other option.

I asked our key leaders to call everyone they knew and tell

them about the move. We put signs on the door of the building

we had vacated and left a few guys there to hand out directions to

people who showed up and hoped for the best. I boarded a plane

on Wednesday to go speak at a conference and was gone until the

following week.

We cancelled the 7:00 p.m. ser vice and rolled back to one service at 5:00 p.m. Lief preached the first Sunday, and it was rough

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 118

02/03/06 11:44:53 AM

350 – 1,000 People • 119

because we were not ready to pull off child care, sound, worship, and

all the details. We had to cancel all of our midweek programming,

the church went into survival mode, and our attendance dropped

noticeably.

The whole mess really bummed me out. One particularly low

point was the Sunday when a drunken lady in a dirty T-shirt wandered down the long center aisle as I was preaching to yell at me for

stealing land from the Indians, demanding that I give it back. I tried

to explain to her that she had the wrong white guy because I rented

a house, did not own any land, and was sorry about the Indians. But

she was not dissuaded. Lief escorted her out and was so kind that

she tried to make out with him.

At this point, we had been in four locations, had held ser vices at

four different times, and had had six phone numbers in a few years.

I had worked myself to near burnout and was still the only paid pastor on staff although there was enough work for ten people.

To make matters worse, I was not even certain that I would pastor Mars Hill for a long time. My plan had been to start the church

and possibly hand it off to one of the elders and move on and plant

another church. It was pretty devastating after a few years of hard

work to be back to a core group under two hundred and starting

over.

I remember going for a walk one day along Lake Washington,

which was near my house. I stopped and stared at the ground for

about an hour, running through my options in my mind, trying to

figure out what to do, and feeling like a caged animal. Should I shut

down the church? Should I contact one of the other churches in the

area and come in as a church-within-a-church ser vice for them?

Should I jump ship and let Lief or Mike figure it out? Should I hang

in there and either turn things around or die trying?

I loved the elders and the members in the church who were

willing to hang in with me no matter what happened. And I felt

obligated to do everything in my power to fight for the mission

Jesus had called me to and I had called them to. I vividly remember

the day shortly thereafter when I stood before what was left of my

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 119

02/03/06 11:44:53 AM

120 • Jesus, Why Am I Getting Fatter . . .

church and told my people that I was giving them my life. I was

going to buy a home, plant my flag in the ground, and give the rest

of my life to them, our city, and our mission. I promised them that

we would succeed or I would literally die trying and begged them

to do the same.

A friend in the church kindly allowed me to move into a large

home he owned on a lease-to-own deal because I was too broke to

qualify to buy anything beyond an outhouse. The seventy-yearold house had over three thousand square feet, seven bedrooms on

three floors, and needed a ton of work because it had been neglected

for many years as a rental home for college students. Grace and I

and our daughter Ashley, three male renters who helped cover the

mortgage, my study, and the church office all moved into the home.

This put me on the job, literally, twenty-four hours a day, seven days

a week, as the boundary between home and church was erased.

We ran the church out of my house for nearly two years, including leadership meetings and Bible studies for various groups on

almost every night of the week. It was not uncommon to have over

seventy people a week in our home. Grace got sucked right back into

the church mess. She was a great host to our guests. But I started

getting bitter toward her because I was again feeling neglected.

I began working seven days a week, trying to save the church

from imminent death. I had decided to go for broke and accepted

that I would either save the church and provide for my family or

probably die of a heart attack. I lived on caffeine and adrenaline

for the better part of two years, ate terribly, and put on nearly forty

pounds.

To reorganize the church, we also started two intentional living

communities in large homes near mine. One became a men’s ministry home called the White Horse Inn, named after the pub Martin Luther frequented. The other became a women’s home called

Noonday, named after a verse in Isaiah. Both homes housed around

ten people and were used to build Chris tian community, host Bible

studies, dinner parties, lectures, and serve along with my home as

the relational and ministry centers of the church.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 120

02/03/06 11:44:54 AM

350 – 1,000 People • 121

During this time, I also saw an increase in spiritual attacks. A

number of people started scheduling meetings with me to explain

horrific demonic attacks they were experiencing. I also started getting a number of prophetic dreams from God to help me make

important decisions that saved our church.

Additionally, I started getting random words of knowledge.

The first I ever got came years prior while I was hosting the radio

program because Lief was on vacation. A man I had never spoken

to before called in from the Midwest to complain about the state

of American Chris tian ity and proceeded to rip into the hypocrisy

in his own church. I rebuked him for committing adultery on his

wife and said he hated his church because he came under conviction

there for being an adulterer, and unless he dumped his girlfriend

and repented to his wife, God would deal severely with him. I can

still remember just staring at the microphone in front of my face,

wanting to take back the words that I had just sent out around the

country. There was a long silence, and then the man broke down

and confessed my words as truth.

Up to this point, I had been basically a theological cessationist

and a fan of fundamentalist straw-man attacks on charismatic Christians. It wasn’t until some years later, however, that I came to see the

cessationists’ interpretation of 1 Co rin thi ans 12 – 14 as the second

worst exegesis I have ever read, next to that of a Canadian nudist

arsonist cult I once did some research on.

I also had not really believed in Satan or demons, spiritual warfare, or the use of certain spiritual gifts with more than a head

knowledge that essentially ignored these things as part of my ministry. Now I was operating for the first time in my life with spiritual power, insight, and authority. For example, one day a woman

from the church walked by me, and God told me that she had been

physically abused by her husband the night before. So I stopped her

and asked her if her husband had beaten her the night before and

forbid her from telling anyone. Immediately she broke down and

confessed what had happened.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 121

02/03/06 11:44:54 AM

122 • Jesus, Why Am I Getting Fatter . . .

My family also started coming under spiritual attack. At one

point, my daughter Ashley, who was only a few years old, started

having a really bad attitude. Despite days of repeated discipline, her

behavior did not improve, and I was befuddled as to why. Late one

night I went in to check on her, and she was still awake. I asked her

why she was not sleeping, and she began to cry but refused to tell

me. I prayed over her, and eventually she told me that for days she

had not slept much because “bad angels” kept showing up in her

room, saying bad things about Jesus and pulling her hair when she

tried to sleep. They scared her by saying that if she told me, they

would kill me. She had been acting up for a few days because she

was sleep deprived, and I had been disciplining her sternly because

I was worn out and on edge. I broke down and wept openly for the

first time I can remember in my adult life and held my daughter,

praying over her and repenting to God for allowing the Enemy to

drive a wedge between my daughter and me.

It was clear that I needed to better understand the supernatural

and demonic side of ministry. So I spent a few months reading every

book I could find on Satan, demons, and spiritual warfare.1 I met

with older pastors who were wise in these areas. I also studied every

occurrence of this issue in the Bible, trying to get a handle on what

I was up against and how I was supposed to respond.

Through study and prayer, I started to better understand the

schemes of Satan and demons and how to help liberate people from

spiritual oppression with the principles of Ephesians 6:10 – 20. By

God’s liberating power, many people stopped taking medications

because the tormenting voices and panic attacks went away. Some

people were also miraculously healed. I did not speak much about

these things because I feared they would detract from our focus on

Jesus and that our young people would start to see me as a guru,

which I did not want. But I was grateful to be able to help these

people I loved, and that part of my ministry quietly continues to

this day.

During this difficult season, I was burned-out, overworked, out

of shape, stressed, and had picked up a nervous twitch in my eye

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 122

02/03/06 11:44:54 AM

350 – 1,000 People • 123

along with ongoing acid reflux and high blood pressure. I was not

sleeping much, and my sleep was often interrupted due to stress

that kept me awake, thinking. I would also often wake up after a

prophetic dream or spiritual attack to pray strategically, which only

contributed to the fatigue. But thanks to growing insights on how

to win spiritual battles, I was optimistic that we would weather the

storm and that the church would survive.

Then I had the worst experience of my whole life.

I went to bed one night hoping to get caught up on sleep. In the

middle of the night, I had a prophetic type of dream that was like

other prophetic dreams I had previously except it did not include

Scripture that clarified its meaning, because it was from Satan. I

cannot go into great detail about the dream because it would impugn

the character of someone else. Something horrendous happened to

this person that I was not present to witness. But my dream was

the equivalent of a horrifying film that showed me every gruesome

detail of the worst day of their life. I was not present for the sin

they committed, but I told them about my dream later and they

confirmed the very graphic details that I saw.

The dream was so vivid that I felt sick and woke up just in time

to run into the bathroom and throw up in the toilet. I went downstairs and spent the rest of the night sitting on the couch, staring

blankly into the dark and asking God to allow me to do anything

but be a pastor. I just wanted to be done with ministry and do something, anything, that would not kill me before I turned thirty.

For weeks, I watched the mental film every night as I tried to

sleep. I knew it was an accusation but could not get it to stop, and so

the torment continued night after night (Rev. 12:10b). Not knowing what to do, I withdrew from God and my wife and threw myself

into my work to keep my mind occupied with something else. I

sometimes worked all night just so that I would not have to go to

bed and watch the nightmare yet again.

During this time, I was also frantically searching for a home

for our church. We were treading water, but it was obvious that

we could not last for much longer in our temporary location. And

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 123

02/03/06 11:44:54 AM

124 • Jesus, Why Am I Getting Fatter . . .

I desperately needed to get the church office, secretary, and all

meetings out of my home. I spent hundreds of hours looking at

every option I could think of, without even one possibility surfacing

because space was limited and we were poor.

Then I called an older man, Stan, who was serving as a consultant for a dying church that I had heard about. He explained that

only a handful of elderly people remained in a small church building on the other side of town, and he had been brought in to recommend what they should do since they had no pastor and no future.

I asked him to give the building to our struggling church for free.

He was a very godly older man who agreed to try, which dropped a

bit of rain amidst our hope drought.

I started attending the weekly prayer meeting of this small

church, which consisted of a handful of women in their eighties,

one “young” woman in her sixties, and one elderly man. I also occasionally preached on Sunday mornings for the less than ten of them

from a King James Bible while wearing a suit.

Eventually, they voted — to give the church to a Chinese church

instead of us.

I was absolutely devastated. Then a few weeks later, I got a

call from Stan, who said that the Chinese church had inexplicably

declined the offer and did not want the free building. So, like Abraham receiving the Promised Land from Lot, we got the building!

The building was in bad shape. The older congregation had not

been downstairs much over the years, and the old Sunday school

rooms were full of junk. One of the heaters was broken, and the

wiring was so old it was not even grounded and, therefore, could

not be used for computers. The flooring was old asbestos tile. And

the walls were mostly a smurfy shade of blue. It would take a lot of

money and months of work to make the place functional since it was

cutting-edge in about 1923.

During the negotiations for the building, we had also pursued

another meeting location. The oldest theater in Seattle, called “the

Ave,” near the University of Washington on the main drag, had

come up for sale. We had been eyeing the vacant and dilapidated

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 124

02/03/06 11:44:54 AM

350 – 1,000 People • 125

small property for years. Lief had quickly put an offer on the place

and got it.

We had a ton of work to do to make the space useable for church

ser vices and all-ages rock concerts. The roof leaked, the place was

filled with junk, the seats were musty and broken, and rat poop was

everywhere. We knew we could never run all of our church ser vices

out of the theater because it was too small for offices, classes, or kids’

space. But it was a strategic location for Sunday church ser vices and

for concerts throughout the week to reach college students and the

young panhandling homeless kids.

To better coordinate the volunteers working on the project,

we got an office across the street from the theater, which we had

renamed “The Paradox.” But all we could afford was an upstairs

apartment in a condemned building. The main floor of our building was a former ghetto East Indian grocery that was vacant and

filled with rats and homeless kids. The basement was a favorite

hangout for local junkies who did black-tar heroin — the area is one

of the nation’s most saturated black-tar heroin trafficking areas. A

few years later Layne Staley, from the band Alice in Chains, died of

a heroin overdose nearby.

We never paid for electricity in our office apartment because

the building was illegally hooked up to the power grid and all our

power was stolen. We did, however, have a high phone bill. Though

the slumlord denied it, he often keyed into our office in the middle

of the night to make lengthy phone calls to India.

The back of the Paradox was a favorite spot for local junkies

to shoot up drugs and poop on the ground. Brad and Eric, who

had both recently come on staff with small salaries, called me one

morning to leave a peculiar voicemail. They had shown up that

morning to work on the building and spotted a homeless junkie

sleeping on the back steps. They yelled at him and he did not wake

up. They approached him and shook him, but he still did not wake

up. Because he was dead. On our church steps.

Rather than calling the cops or an ambulance, Eric and Brad

first called me to hurry up and come see the dead guy. I did not

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 125

02/03/06 11:44:55 AM

126 • Jesus, Why Am I Getting Fatter . . .

get the voicemail in time. So eventually they called the cops, who

brought out the coroner to haul the dead junkie away.

Suddenly we had gone from being homeless to being a church

with two buildings. The only problems were that the buildings were

about twenty minutes apart and both needed a lot of renovation,

which required money that we did not have. Lief was kind enough

to do most of the major work on the Paradox with his construction

company, along with the volunteers who worked hard to get the

building ready for occupancy.

One humble and godly couple in the church came into some

money and asked me to meet them for coffee. During our meeting,

they told me they wanted to give $200,000 to pay for the renovations

on the buildings we had gotten. I nearly died; it was about $198,000

more than the largest check we had ever cashed previously.

Their money, along with much smaller gifts from people in the

church, allowed us to renovate both the church building and the

Paradox at the same time. Both facilities were finished around the

same time, and we moved the offices to the church building and

began hosting concerts at the Paradox.

I was far more excited about the Paradox than about the old

church. The old church had a horrendous location, hidden in an

old neighborhood far away from any major freeway, which made

it as hard to find as a fundamentalist having fun. My only hope

for the building was to use it for offices and midweek classes and

meetings.

Conversely, the Paradox was a great opportunity to be in a hip

neighborhood with the only exclusively all-ages concert venue in

the city, thanks to a legal loophole we exploited. The Paradox only

rarely hosted Chris tian bands since our main goal was getting nonChris tian kids to come to the concerts. Our focus was hospitality.

Paul commanded the church at Rome to practice hospitality, and one

the qualifications for elders-pastors is that they practice hospitality.

Many Chris tians wrongly think that hospitality is the welcoming

of fellow Chris tians into their home and church for friendship. But

that is fellowship. Hospitality is when Chris tians welcome strangers,

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 126

02/03/06 11:44:55 AM

350 – 1,000 People • 127

especially non-Chris tians, into their homes, lives, and church. So

we welcomed kids into a safe place where we could build relationships of grace on Jesus’ behalf rather than preaching at the kids or

doing goofy things like handing out tracts.

In its first few years, the Paradox hosted about 650 concerts for

about 65,000 kids. We have had only a few minor problems, like the

Japanese punk band that got naked during their set for no apparent

reason and another band that set off fireworks during their show.

The Paradox has seen many kids come to faith through relationships and has helped us maintain a very good relationship with the

music and alternative-life scene in Seattle because we genuinely

love the kids who are into punk, hardcore, and indie rock.

The 5:00 p.m. ser vice remained in the big church downtown,

and we started a new ser vice at 7:00 p.m. in the Paradox. I drove

between the two to preach. At the first Paradox ser vice, Team

Strikeforce led worship and I preached to the thirty or forty kids

who showed up.

We also needed to start a morning ser vice in the old church

building because we had promised the elderly folks who gave us the

building that we would. I got stuck preaching that ser vice because

none of the elders would. Assuming the morning ser vice at the old

church building was a waste of time, I asked the church secretary

to help me launch the morning ser vice and did not bring any other

leaders with me.

The first week of having three ser vices in three locations was

disappointing because the two new ser vices were very small, while

the evening ser vice downtown was holding steady at a few hundred

people. I was hoping that at least one of the sites would get traction

and grow, but it did seem silly to have three ser vices for about 250

people in three buildings with a combined seating of more than

1,400.

To make matters worse, I took my first overseas trip to train a

number of pastors in India. The first leg of the flight took all night,

and I barely slept because I was in a middle seat on a packed flight

and my head bobbed around all night like a buoy on a lake. We had

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 127

02/03/06 11:44:55 AM

128 • Jesus, Why Am I Getting Fatter . . .

a layover in an Asian country, and in the airport was a nice hotel

with a spa. I decided to go in for a massage to get the knots out

of my neck before the next lengthy flight and then take a shower,

brush my teeth, and change my clothes. The attractive woman performing the massage was hot — like hell. I was nearly asleep during

the massage, until the moment she kindly asked me if I wanted any

sexual favors and began to list her impressive skills.

This was not good.

I was burned-out, underpaid, in debt, sexually frustrated due

to an unspectacular sex life, under frequent demonic attack, and

so stressed that my blood pressure hovered somewhere between

heart-attack victim and mulch in the ground, and now found myself

alone with an attractive woman in a foreign country. In retrospect,

I think the decision I made in that moment was perhaps the most

significant ministry decision I have ever made. To be honest, I was

incredibly tempted. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying

to figure out what my answer was. In my mind I saw Joseph running

from Potiphar’s wife.

So I jumped up from the massage table like a kid with a bee

sting, grabbed my things in one hand, and ran out of the room,

down the hallway, and out of the hotel. I vowed to God that I would

get my life under control upon returning home. That day was my

proverbial fork in the road, and I shudder to think that had I chosen

sin, our church and my marriage would likely not be intact today.

Shortly after returning home a few weeks later, I absolutely

cracked. In one day I had around ten hours of back-to-back meetings with young single men in the church, which pushed me over

the edge. Every one of them was older than me, a chronic masturbator, a porn addict, banging weak-willed girls like a screen door in

a stiff breeze, not tithing, and wanting me to hang out with them

a lot to keep them accountable. By about the fourth or fifth guy,

something in me completely snapped. I stood up and cussed out the

poor guy, losing my mind to the point that I think I actually cuffed

him upside the head. I told him that in Galatians 6:1 – 5 we are told

that guys need to take care of light burdens and only burden the

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 128

02/03/06 11:44:55 AM

350 – 1,000 People • 129

church with big issues and that guys older than me would need to

get their erections under control because it was not my job.

It then dawned on me that I was dealing with an imbecile epidemic. Most of our guys never had a dad and were either cowardly

mama’s boys or thuggish pervert jerks. The problem was that neither type was sufficient for building a church that could reach the

city for Jesus. Worse still, seemingly every guy in the church was a

slave to his lusts. Frightfully, only a few weeks earlier, I had nearly

taken Satan’s bait myself without seeing the hook.

At this time, our church also started an unmoderated discussion

board on our website, called Midrash, and it was being inundated

with postings by emerging-church-type feminists and liberals. I

went onto the site and posted as William Wallace II, after the great

Scottish man portrayed in the movie Braveheart, and attacked those

who were posting. It got insane, and thousands of posts were being

made each day until it was discovered that it was me raging like

a madman under the guise of a movie character. One guy got so

mad that he actually showed up at my house to fight me one night

around 3:00 a.m.

Things were starting to get out of hand with the men, so I called

a meeting and demanded that all of the men in our church attend.

I preached for more than two hours about manhood and basically

gave the dad talk to my men for looking at porno, sleeping with

young women, not serving Christ, not working hard at their jobs,

and so on. I demanded that the men who were with me on our mission to change the city stay and that the rest leave the church and

stop getting in the way because you can’t charge hell with your pants

around your ankles, a bottle of lotion in one hand, and a Kleenex

in the other.

On their way out of that meeting, I handed each man two stones

and told them that on this day God was giving them their balls back

to get the courage to do kingdom work. Guys put them on their

monitors at work or glued them to the dash of their truck and kept

them like stones of remembrance from the Old Testament. The

next week the offering doubled and the men caught fire. It was a

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 129

02/03/06 11:44:55 AM

130 • Jesus, Why Am I Getting Fatter . . .

surreal time, since I was basically fathering guys my own age and

treating them more like a military unit than a church.

The life change was unreal. We had guys getting saved en

masse. We had gay guys going straight. We had guys tossing out

porn, getting jobs, tithing, taking wives, buying homes, making

babies, and repenting of the sins of their fathers. We had guys who

had divorced their wives remarrying them. We had men adopting

children so they would have a Chris tian father. It was a lot like Acts

because the whole city seemed to be abuzz.

This season was messy and I sinned and cussed a lot, but God

somehow drew a straight line with my crooked Philistine stick. I

had a good mission, but some of my tactics were born out of anger

and burnout, and I did a lot of harm and damage while attracting a

lot of attention. I was justifiably angry, but did not faithfully heed

Paul’s command not to let anger lead me into sin (Eph. 4:26).

Some of the fired-up young guys went too far and started acting

like young bucks in rutting season, wanting to lock horns with me

and the elders. Many went into extreme forms of Calvinism and

wanted to debate things like theonomy and other dumb things that

only white guys with high-speed Internet connections to bizarre

websites could get into and were causing division. If you don’t know

what theonomy is, don’t worry, because you aren’t really missing

anything. Basically, it is the belief that the church should rule the

world, including the banking system, government, and so on, and

enforce Old Testament law like Israel did. The young rabid Calvinists who were pushing for this doctrine did not yet own homes,

most did not even have wives, and some still lived with their mothers. I tried to set them straight by telling them to get dominion over

their room before they took over the world, but like most fools, they

were not deterred.

There were too many guys to fight individually, and I needed a

way to fight with them all at once. So in an effort to clean up the

mess, I started a weekly men-only meeting, which I named “Dead

Men” and which ran for a few months. I paired guys up to debate

an assigned theological issue, and other guys in the audience would

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 130

02/03/06 11:44:55 AM

350 – 1,000 People • 131

chuck things at them and mock them if their study was not good or

their argument not cogent. At the end of the debate, we would vote,

declare a winner, and give him a mock prize and crown him with a

Viking helmet. The men liked the competition and got into studying and debating theology.

When the hyper-Calvinists realized we weren’t going to baptize

their babies or talk about stupid stuff that detracts from mission,

many of them left, which was a good thing because they were getting to be deadweight. Over the years, I’ve just accepted that if I do

not quickly open the back door when God is trying to run people

out of our church, I am working against God by keeping sick people

in my church so that they can infect others. Indeed, the church is

a body, and one of the most important parts is the colon. Like the

human body, any church body without a colon is destined for sickness that leads to death.

During this melee, a nearby Chris tian college whose students

are mostly female and feminist had a few guys ask me to come and

speak to their dorm floor about masculinity. A buzz went out on

campus, and perhaps a few hundred guys showed up. We debated

manhood until after midnight, and I was soon banned from coming back to the campus again, which only added to the buzz. These

Chris tian “guys” were so effeminate it was unbelievable. In the end,

I unnecessarily burned the bridge at the college in a public debate

with the head of the theology department before hundreds of students on the issue of ministers in skirts. I’m pretty sure I won the

debate while losing a warm relationship with the college, which was

likely unwise.

We also began “boot camps” for our young men, teaching them

how to get a wife, have sex with that wife, get a job, budget money,

buy a house, father a child, study the Bible, stop looking at porn,

and brew decent beer. The buzz hit just as we opened the 7:00 p.m.

Paradox ser vice and the 10:00 a.m. ser vice at the small church

building, in addition to the 5:00 p.m. downtown ser vice. I chose to

preach on the most controversial practical life issues, such as dating,

gender, work, kids, sex, money, and the like, in a long topical series

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 131

02/03/06 11:44:56 AM

132 • Jesus, Why Am I Getting Fatter . . .

from the book of Proverbs to continue fanning the fire that was

burning in our church among the young men who had caught the

vision to become patriarchs.

Both locations took off at the same time solely through word

of mouth. The two hundred Paradox seats filled up in less than a

year, and we went to 6:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. ser vices in addition to

the 5:00 p.m. ser vice downtown. Though the 10:00 a.m. ser vice in

the small church building started with forty people and no fanfare,

it exploded like a bomb. We learned that unchurched people tend

to be the most traditional when it comes to church. For years, we

had held ser vices only on Sunday nights trying to be cool, different, and therefore more attractive to unchurched people. But our

first morning ser vice took off in part because unchurched people

thought that church was an event that happened in a church building on a Sunday morning.

People kept coming solely through word of mouth, and we kept

adding ser vices. Within a year, the original 10:00 a.m. ser vice in

the new church building became three morning ser vices (9:00 a.m.,

11:00 a.m., and 1:00 p.m.), in addition to the existing 5:00 p.m.

ser vice, which we moved from downtown into the small church

building. The small church room only seated about 180 people, but

within a year, the ser vices there exploded from 40 to about 800

people. People were jammed in throughout the building, and we

put speakers in the basement, around corners, and in offices so that

people could at least listen to the sermon though they could not

see me or the band. Some Sundays we had to leave the doors open

and have the single men stand outside with coats on during the service because we could not physically pack another person into the

church. We had only one toilet for each gender and only one parking spot, and Sundays were a mayhem marathon.

The longest sermon I preached was about an hour and forty

minutes, without any notes, and one church ser vice would often

last so long that it still would not be done when the next ser vice

was supposed to be beginning. I was on such a rampage that I really

did not care about the clock and just kept ranting until I had said

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 132

02/03/06 11:44:56 AM

350 – 1,000 People • 133

everything I wanted to say. During this time, I finally learned how

to preach with consistency week in and week out. Though preaching for six to nine hours on Sundays nearly killed me, it also helped

me refine each sermon by improving on it each of the six times I

preached it, after getting feedback and answering questions from

people after each sermon. Simply, preaching is like driving a clutch,

and the only way to figure it out is to keep grinding the gears and

stalling until you figure it out.

The sermons were so long that we really did not have any breaks

between ser vices and just kept singing and preaching all day. People

came in and out whenever they liked and stuck around long enough

to sing, hear one sermon, and take communion. It was an absolute

logistical nightmare, but the buzz just kept growing so that people

started showing up over an hour early to reserve a seat for themselves

and their friends. It was peculiar to look out before our 5:00 p.m.

evening ser vice and see people eating dinner an hour before the service began to ensure they could get a good seat in our small church.

Parking was so scarce that people walked for many blocks to

get to the church, and the neighbors started complaining because

we had once again completely overtaken a previously nice, quiet

neighborhood. The fire marshal was sent out to shut us down but

got saved, which bought us some time. Many of the neighbors came

to the church, and some came to Christ.

Next door to our church lived a very large, very loud, and very

unpleasant woman. She went to another local church and often

walked into our ser vices to publicly cuss us all out. I nicknamed her

“the finger lady” because she often sat on her front porch giving our

people the finger and calling them whores and bastards while they

walked to the church, as she chain-smoked and perfected her selfinduced Tourette’s syndrome. We never forbade her from coming

in to interrupt our ser vices, and her insanity only added to our buzz

since everyone talked about the church with the crazy big lady who

periodically waddled in to cuss people out during the ser vice.

During this time, I was suffering from vertigo. I had taught

at a conference on a cruise ship, and something got messed up in

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 133

02/03/06 11:44:56 AM

134 • Jesus, Why Am I Getting Fatter . . .

my inner ear. I spent the year feeling incredibly dizzy because of a

strange syndrome that usually happens only to middle-aged menopausal women after a cruise. It was not the kind of manly diagnosis

I was hoping for, such as being dizzy because I had too much testosterone in my body. The dizziness got so bad that one day while tilting my head to look at a video on a lower shelf in a store, I actually

fell over like a drunk. Driving a car became a harrowing adventure

not unlike drinking and driving because my depth perception was

completely off.

Nonetheless, I was preaching upward of an hour and a half six

times a day and driving between two buildings with constant dizziness. Some of the sermons on sex were R-rated, and we gave warnings to parents and sometimes saw whole visiting youth groups walk

out blushing halfway through the sermon. On other occasions,

people walked out during the sermon and flipped me off on their

way out, a trend that has continued.

To survive, we had to make some big adjustments. We reached

the point where we could not grow by another person, the fire

department was going to shut us down, we had six ser vices on Sundays in two locations, I had vertigo, and some people were so upset

that they were showing up at my house to cuss me out face-to-face.

Additionally, the people in the church were coming to ser vices of

150 to 250 people and had the perception that they were coming

to a happening small church. Consequently, they wanted the same

kind of access to me and my family that they would get in a small

church. The only problem was that with six ser vices, we were not a

small church but were giving the appearance that we were, which

made things very difficult.

So we split the church three ways, and I functioned in an apostolic role for the three congregations that together made up Mars

Hill. Mike took some of the people to start a new ser vice in the

south end of the city. Lief came on staff to run the concerts and

church ser vices at the Paradox, I took the four Ballard ser vices, and

all together we had three preachers running seven ser vices for over

one thousand people in three parts of the city, functioning as one

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 134

02/03/06 11:44:56 AM

350 – 1,000 People • 135

church with one elder board and one central office. About eight

hundred of the people stayed with me in the four Ballard ser vices.

We had to quickly reorganize all of our systems and staff. Our

administrative pastor, Eric, left, which we all recognized was God’s

call on him. And our worship leader was a great guy and great musician but was unable to coordinate the multiple bands in the three

locations, so we let him go. This was one of the hardest decisions

I’ve ever made because he was a very godly man who had worked

very hard and would have been fine if the church had not gotten

so crazy so quickly, and he and his very sweet wife were both close

personal friends of mine. But I needed a worship pastor who could

lead multiple bands, coordinate multiple ser vices in multiple locations, and train multiple worship pastors while keeping up with a

church that was growing so fast that we had no idea exactly where it

was going. I had no one who could possibly fill this role but felt compelled to wait until God let me know, so I just left a gaping hole in

our leadership to create a crisis that would force a leader to emerge.

A very wise friend who is a successful business entrepreneur,

Jon Phelps, shared an insight with me around this time that was

very clarifying. He said that in any growing organization, there are

three kinds of people, and only two of them have any long-term

future with a growing organization. First, there are people on the

rise who demonstrate an uncanny ability to grow with the organization and become vital leaders. Second, there are people who

attach themselves to the people on the rise as valuable assistants

who rise by being attached to someone on the rise. Third, there

are people who neither rise nor attach to anyone who is rising, and

they cannot keep up with the growing demands of the organization.

These people fall behind, and the organization can either allow

their inability to slow down the whole team or release them and

move forward without them. This is difficult to do because they are

often good people who have been partly responsible for the success

of the organization. But the needs of the organizational mission,

not an individual in the organization, must continually remain the

priority if there is to be continued success.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 135

02/03/06 11:44:56 AM

136 • Jesus, Why Am I Getting Fatter . . .

Up until this point, nearly everyone in the church had been

connected to me, and I could no longer pull them all up with me.

Simply, leaders needed to rise on their own or attach themselves to

other people on the rise, or they would have to be let go.

So we made all these difficult decisions, and the church stabilized. Finally, we had facilities, money, men rising up to lead,

intentional community housing, a successful concert venue, and a

church that seemed organized to us. We had grown a church of one

thousand people in a tough urban culture despite massive hardship.

With things going so well, I feared we’d get too comfortable, and so

I decided it was time to blow it all up, create some strategic chaos,

and start over yet again.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 136

02/03/06 11:44:57 AM

350 – 1,000 People • 137

Reformission Reflections

1. Which of the four elements in corporate worship is your church

or ministry strongest and weakest on: singing, preaching,

communion, or prayer?

2. What is the biggest hardship your church or ministry has ever

faced? What is the biggest hardship your church or ministry is

currently facing?

3. How have Satan and demons sought to destroy your church or

ministry and your own personal life?

4. What is the biggest blessing God has ever given your church or

ministry?

5. What is the biggest blessing God has ever given you personally?

6. What sinful temptation have you said no or yes to that most

changed your life?

7. How well is your church or ministry doing at attracting,

retaining, rebuking, inspiring, and raising up young men to be

godly and masculine? What more can be done to achieve this

goal?

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 137

02/03/06 11:44:57 AM

031020755X_relation_fm.qxp 9/8/06 2:21 PM Page 1

This page is intentionally left blank

I had never played in a band

or written a song when

I came to the church.

Today I am the

worship pastor.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 139

02/03/06 11:44:57 AM

Jesus, Today We Voted

to Take a Jackhammer

to Your Big Church

1,000 – 4,000 People

It was a warm spring day and I sat in my office at the church, gazing

out the window at large white clouds blowing through a clear blue

sky, enjoying our success. I had lost about forty pounds by shifting

from the Fatkins to the Atkins diet, had paid off all the personal

debts I had accrued as a broke pastor, had fixed up the old home for

my family, was getting closer to my lovely wife, was enjoying my

three children while looking forward to a fourth, finally owned a

vehicle with less than 200,000 miles on it, and was the pastor of one

of the largest churches in our city at the age of thirty-one. My eye

no longer twitched, I wasn’t throwing up from acid reflux, and my

vertigo had cleared up.

I was sitting at my new desk, which was the first piece of furniture I had ever owned that was not a donated hand-me-down. I was

sitting on a nice office chair, which someone anonymously left for

me with the note “For my pastor.” We owned our church building

outright and had money in the bank. I had a large staff for a church

our size and was sleeping like a Calvinist at nights because things

were under control.

On that day I had only a few appointments, with lengthy breaks

in between. I decided to walk down to the deli a few blocks away

and get a Reuben sandwich on sourdough bread and some fresh air.

On the way back, I walked barefoot and remember thinking that

these simple pleasures had made the day one of the most relaxing

140

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 140

02/03/06 11:45:00 AM

1,000 – 4,000 People • 141

and satisfying days I ever had. But by the time I walked back to the

church, I realized that I was already getting bored. There was no

dragon to slay, no hill to charge, no battle to fight, and no foe to

conquer.

It was the winter of 2002, and our church had fought through

hell and had gone from homeless to one thousand people — a big

deal in Seattle. I had nearly killed myself and had gotten the church

to the comfort zone.1

As I sat at my desk eating my sandwich, I ruminated on a simple

talk that Richard DeVos, the founder of Amway, gave at our national

Acts 29 conference, in which he explained four simple phases of

organizational decline.2 In what follows, I have expanded on his

teaching and have reoriented it for church ministry.

Phase 1 — Creative, the dream stage

Phase 2 — Management, the reality stage

Phase 3 — Defensive justification, the failure stage

Phase 4 — Blaming, the death stage

The comfort zone is the place a church commonly falls into once they

have learned how to survive. This is the state of most American churches,

with between 60 and 80 percent of all churches in America either plateaued or declining in membership and/or attendance.3 In the comfort

zone, often there is no longer a visible immediate crisis since the bills

are paid, most of the big jobs are being done by someone, leaders are

officially in place, a permanent facility has been secured, and the people

in the church have generally grown to know and love one another. At this

stage, the propensity is for the church to settle in, accept its size, and

slip into a mode of maintenance. At some point, people will move away

or die, others will get bored, and slowly the church will begin a cycle of

decline unless it intentionally reinvents itself missionally to continue to

grow by taking risks in an effort to reach lost people for Jesus.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 141

02/03/06 11:45:00 AM

142 • Jesus, Today We Voted to Take a Jackhammer . . .

Phase 1 — Creative, the dream stage. The creative phase is the beginning of a new church or a new project within a church. This phase

is marked by enthusiasm, hope, and numerous ideas that are considered for implementation, which causes momentum. The early days

of our church plant were filled with this kind of creative energy,

and the young and motivated people in our church were filled with

ideas for all that we could do. Once we lost our building, we were

thrust into another creative phase as we struggled to survive. And

we returned to a creative phase when we acquired the two buildings and were able to again dream of ways to grow our ministry.

I noticed that each time we were in a creative phase, our church

attracted more entrepreneurial types of skilled leaders who were

excited about the opportunity to try something new and make a

difference in our city. This indicates that chaos and crisis can be

leveraged to a church’s benefit.

Phase 2 — Management, the reality stage. In the management phase,

the ministry project becomes a reality and requires a great deal of

organization, management, and problem solving to make it successful. This phase can be a lot of hard work and is not as enthusiastically pursued because it is tedious and difficult. But without

managing the creative ideas, success is not possible. We spent a few

years working through very difficult management issues, such as

obtaining and renovating facilities, opening a concert venue, maintaining ministry homes, and starting new ser vices. Each of these

ministries succeeded, which required increasing management, such

as funding, facilities, systems, leaders, theology, and technology.

The hope for every church is that they work through their management issues, thereby enabling them to return to the creative phase,

where they dream up a new project and enthusiastically undertake

it and raise a whole new set of management issues to overcome.

Therefore, the goal of the management phase is not to get the

church organized or under control. Rather, the management phase

is needed to eliminate the inefficiencies and barriers that are keeping the church from refocusing back on the creative phase and creating a whole new set of problems to manage.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 142

02/03/06 11:45:00 AM

1,000 – 4,000 People • 143

Phase 3 — Defensive justification, the failure stage. In the defensive justification phase, something has gone terribly wrong and has failed

at the management stage. Or the church succeeded at the management stage but never returned to the creative phase and got stuck

with a bunch of well-organized managers running the church but

no creative and visionary new ideas to move the church forward.

When this phase sets in, the church begins to stall, plateau, and

slowly decline. People are less motivated to serve, money is less

generously given, and a cloud of lethargy and complaint begins to

settle in. This is because some leaders in the church start to act

defensively and justify their failures rather than finding creative or

management ways to overcome them. In this phase, time, money,

and energy are spent to explain problems rather than to fix them,

which is the primary clue that organizational death is on the horizon unless changes are made. Because the church is in a defensive

posture, people start to leave the church, and the best and brightest

people are no longer attracted to the church because it has lost sight

of any risky mission that calls people to rise up in faith. The peculiar truth of the defensive justification phase is that many of the

excuses provided in this season are in fact valid. But whether or not

they are valid, the fact remains that they need to be overcome.

Phase 4 — Blaming, the death stage. An organization that remains

stuck in the defensive justification phase for too long inevitably

then declines to the blaming phase. In the blaming phase, it is obvious that the church or ministry is going to die, and excuses and

explanations for the death have been devised. This does not necessarily mean that the church will be closing its doors; effectively

dead churches have been known to keep the doors open on Sundays

for many years to welcome a handful of people who have no mission. In this phase, the focus of the church is determining who will

be blamed for the failure so that another group of people can escape

responsibility for the failure. Some churches blame the pastor and

fire him, others blame Satan and spiritualize everything, and still

others blame the outside culture as being too dark for a church to

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 143

02/03/06 11:45:01 AM

144 • Jesus, Today We Voted to Take a Jackhammer . . .

thrive. Rarely does the leadership of a church in this phase rise up

to repent of the things that are preventing the church from returning to the life-giving creative phase, and eventually the church dies.

It was precisely this kind of church that gave us the free building

after they died.

And it was in that building where I now sat, ruminating on all

of this while eating my Reuben sandwich and gazing out the window. By the time I had finished the last bite of the adjoining pickle,

I decided to start going to the mountains at least a few hours each

week for silence, solitude, and prayer to ask Jesus what creative

phase he wanted us to pursue next.

After a lot of long drives and walks with Jesus, I was convicted

by the Holy Spirit that we had settled our management issues but

needed to get back to creativity and mission because otherwise our

success would become our problem. Through prayer, I came to see

that we would lose our edge and settle in as yet another well-managed predictable church for a season and then decline into defensive

justification and eventual death and blaming unless the elders and

I as the leaders of the church returned to the creative phase and

accepted that being missional involves continual risk and faith.

I feared that deconstructing and essentially restarting the church

would kill us. I had found it a bit easier to take a risky gamble when

we had nothing, but now we had something to lose. In the end, I

realized that every person, every dollar, and every other resource

belonged to Jesus and that he did not give us those treasures to bury

them.

What comforted me most as I was prayerfully thinking through

our next season was a lengthy study through the New Testament in

which I searched for what God promises to do for the church. As

I studied, I learned that God promises to grow his church, select

elders, save people, bless the teaching of his Word, gift people with

exactly the abilities the church needs, and providentially make up

for human mistakes if people are repentant of their sins. By the end

of my studies, I was confident that our future would be fine because

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 144

02/03/06 11:45:01 AM

1,000 – 4,000 People • 145

the heavy lifting would continue to be done by Jesus and that we

just needed to trust him with obedience and keep going.

At this time, I learned the difference between various types of

leaders from Bob Biehl, a consultant who spoke at a small training

event hosted by Leadership Network.

I could not lead the church to the next level by myself. I needed

another opportunity seeker and another goal setter on my elder

team to help instigate the strategic chaos of yet another creative

phase. So I chose two of our best emerging leaders to prepare them

for eldership to lead the next season of our church.

Jamie came to Seattle at the age of nineteen, drinking, smoking

pot, and having spent most of his life driving around in a maturity

cul de sac, listening to Bon Jovi albums in the great nation of Montana. In Seattle, he lived with his sister and brother-in-law, Jen and

Phil, who had been with the church from the beginning. They were

the first couple who showed up with kids when we were in our core

phase.

Through their influence, Jamie came to faith, was baptized by

me, later ran the White Horse Inn men’s house, and interned under

our administrative pastor, Eric, who groomed Jamie to replace

him. Jamie was not formally educated and was a newer Chris tian

but was also an incredibly gifted leader. After his one-year unpaid

Three Types of Leaders:

1. Opportunity Seekers — continually seek new opportunities and are

highly motivated by change and growth.

2. Goal Setters — make plans and break projects into phases to ensure

chaos is managed so that success is achieved.

3. Problem Solvers — continually seek to understand potential problems

and needs so that barriers to success can be proactively identified

and removed.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 145

02/03/06 11:45:01 AM

146 • Jesus, Today We Voted to Take a Jackhammer . . .

internship, we hired Jamie full-time to run the church as a deacon,

with the intention of growing him up to be an elder. Jamie and I

got along well, and I incrementally handed more and more of the

management of the church over to him. Jamie fired some of the

staff and began reorganizing every aspect of the church. His decisions were very controversial, and my phone was ringing with a few

angry people threatening to leave if I did not reign him in. But to

override Jamie’s first controversial decisions would have rendered

him impotent from that point forward. I chose to support Jamie for

better or worse and just accept that some people would leave the

church. Whether or not he made the right choices, I knew he would

learn from them and would become a phenomenal executive pastor

one day. I too had made many mistakes and was given the freedom

to grow into my role, and Jamie deserved the same opportunity.

Over time, it became clear that Jamie was in fact right in his early

controversial decisions.

I first met Tim while teaching at a conference in New Mexico

for Leadership Network. He had been raised in a Baptist home in

Portland and was working as a youth worship leader at a Lutheran

church in Missouri. Tim and his wife, Beth, moved to Seattle simply hoping that Tim would become a guitar player in one of our

worship teams. Tim and his wife lived with Grace and me for a few

months until they got settled, and I saw in Tim some very strong

leadership qualities that had not been cultivated. So I spent a lot of

time investing in Tim, as I was with Jamie. Tim had never played in

a band, written a song, or played an electric guitar. Additionally, he

did not know how to sing, and it sounded like he had been hit by a

car when he tried to hit high notes.

But I really liked Tim because he is one of the few manly men

whom I have ever seen leading worship. I am not supposed to say

this, but most of the worship dudes I have heard are not very dudely.

They seem to be very in touch with their feelings and exceedingly

chickified from playing too much acoustic guitar and singing prom

songs to Jesus while channeling Michael Bolton and flipping their

hair. Tim was a guy who brewed his own beer, smoked a pipe, rock

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 146

02/03/06 11:45:01 AM

1,000 – 4,000 People • 147

climbed, mountain biked, river rafted, carried a knife on his belt,

and talked about what he thought more than what he felt.

We clicked because I drive a 1978 Chevy truck that gets single

digits to the gallon and has a bacon air freshener and no functioning speedometer and because I fashion myself as the self-appointed

leader of a heterosexual male backlash in our overly chickified city

filled with guys drinking herbal tea and rocking out to Mariah Carey

in their lemon yellow Volkswagen Cabriolets while wearing fuchsia

sweater vests that perfectly match their open-toed shoes. Anyways,

Tim learned quickly, took vocal lessons, and soon assumed leadership over the entire worship department. Like Jamie, he started by

firing most everyone and started over from scratch.

As opportunity seeking leaders well-suited for the creative

phase, Jamie, Tim, and I began envisioning what the next phase of

the church should look like if we hoped to stay on mission. I decided

to never view our church as a church but rather always to view it like

a church planter with a core group launching out to reach the city.

Now we simply had a core of one thousand instead of the original

twelve that began in the living room of my home.

I started studying the major differences between smaller and

larger churches. My hope was to first understand the dynamics of

a large church and then plan with the elders to build that larger

church. As I studied, a few dozen items particularly struck me, and

I gleaned other insights from observing larger churches.4

I began writing out how I envisioned our church at 3,000-plus

people. I chose this number because roughly half of all megachurches

have between 2,000 and 3,000 people, and the other half have over

3,000 people, according to a conversation with John Vaughan of

Church Growth Today. This means that the 3,000 barrier is the

most difficult of any church size to overcome. Therefore, it seemed

prudent to push for that goal with plans to reorganize if and when

we got over the 3,000 mark.

So I began to reverse-engineer a plan for our church to grow to

more than three thousand people with help from Jamie and Tim.

In the end, we decided that what was in the best interests of our

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 147

02/03/06 11:45:02 AM

148 • Jesus, Today We Voted to Take a Jackhammer . . .

mission to the city was not in the best interests of each of our elders.

I knew God was compelling me to state the vision to the elders.

And I knew that the vision would quite possibly split the church

three ways between the founders — Lief, Mike, and me. Nonetheless, I met with our elders to seek their input on the recommended

changes, knowing it could undo all that we had worked so hard to

accomplish. We spent a lengthy day going over the proposal, and

things were tense.

Mike and two elders chose to take their church ser vice out as a

separate church plant. This decision was tough because I genuinely

loved Mike, and still do. He was an older man who had faithfully

encouraged and supported me through the toughest times in our

church. But he wanted his own pulpit and felt called to a mission

in a different part of the city and would need to be released so that

we could each follow the mission Jesus had called us to. Many of

our people loved Mike and would leave with him, which meant we

might take a hit in terms of leaders and dollars. But it was the right

thing to do for the gospel.

I asked my dear friend and accountability partner, Lief, to shut

down the Paradox because the concerts were losing a lot of money,

give up the pulpit, and become the associate pastor. Lief tearfully

agreed to shoot his dream and do what was best for the whole

church.

In shutting down the Paradox, we also had to let go of two very

godly young deacons named Jeff and Josh. Josh had lived at my

house and demonstrated gifts in both teaching and leadership but

was just not yet ready to run that ministry by himself. Jeff was and

is a well-known punk musician in our area who has fronted bands

like 90 Pound Wuss and Suffering and the Hideous Thieves. The

Paradox kids loved Jeff, and when they found out that we were shutting the concert venue down and releasing Jeff, many of them were

very angry because to them everyone at the Paradox was a family

and we had ruined it. Our credibility with the music scene largely

came down to how Jeff would respond. If he got bitter, we were

doomed and would get smeared in the local alternative press, have

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 148

02/03/06 11:45:02 AM

1,000 – 4,000 People • 149

at least a hundred young punk-rock fans leave our church, and see

yet another collapse in our worship department as the many musicians who loved Jeff departed.

To Jeff’s credit, he was the biggest defender of the church during this difficult season and lovingly led the young indie and punkrock fans to stick with the church and trust the elders. Today Jeff

remains a vital church member, helping to lead worship as the bass

player in Team Strikeforce. God has honored him with a great job

in the entertainment industry, a beautiful wife, and two of the most

adorable children God has ever given one of his sons. I will forever

remain grateful to Jeff for his sacrifice to our mission. He is one of

the great unsung heroes in the history of our church because he did

what was best for the church instead of what was best for him, and

God blessed both him and our church for it.

I asked the elders to shut down the Noonday women’s home

despite the fact that it had led many women to Jesus and had done

much good for our church. Simply, it was losing money and was

some $20,000 in debt.

I also asked the elders to shut down the White Horse Inn men’s

home despite the fact that leaders such as Jamie were raised up from

within the house. Like nearly all of our staff members over the

years, these young leaders worked full-time for a year as unpaid

interns before coming on as paid staff because we could not initially

afford to pay them. But a lesser quality of men had moved into the

house, and they were not very ministry-minded. Instead, we were

focusing our energies on encouraging solid married couples to purchase larger homes that could accommodate renters and guests to

provide community living opportunities without the financial burden being placed upon the church.

I asked the elders to centralize all of Mars Hill into our small

church building and run four ser vices there. We needed to cut our

costs, cut our staff, and raise money to purchase a much larger

building that would seat at least a thousand people, which would

radically change our entire church and likely cause some people to

leave.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 149

02/03/06 11:45:02 AM

150 • Jesus, Today We Voted to Take a Jackhammer . . .

Through reading books5 and speaking with pastors of large

churches — such as Wayne Cordero, Michael Slaughter, Tim Keller,

Larry Osborne, Leith Anderson, Robert Lewis, and Rick Warren

— in conversations that lasted from a few minutes to a few hours,

I started to better understand how we would need to change if the

church were to be able to continue to innovate and grow. Ten principles in particular stuck with me.

1. I needed to transition from caring for all the people to

ensuring they were all cared for by raising up elders,

deacons, and church members.

2. I needed to transition from being everyone’s pastor to being

the missiologist-preacher who led the church from the Bible

in the pulpit.

3. I needed to stop doing most of the work I was doing and

deploy more elders and deacons to manage church members

who would do the work of the ministry.

4. I needed to transition from working both in the church and

on the church to almost exclusively working on the church,

continually making plans to connect the Bible with our

culture, like Paul did as a missiologist-apostle.

5. Our internal and external church communication needed

to transition from informal and oral to written and formal,

which would include me writing lots of email templates,

booklets, and position papers to inform our people.

6. We needed to transition our people from a survivalist

mentality that focused on the present to a settler mentality

that focused on a lasting legacy.

7. We needed our people to accept that we would be a very

large church.

8. We needed to ensure that in the tension between caring

for Chris tians and reaching non-Chris tians, evangelism

continually remained our highest priority.

9. We needed to accept the fact that some people would

feel less connected to my family and me, experience

displacement, and leave the church.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 150

02/03/06 11:45:02 AM

1,000 – 4,000 People • 151

10. My wife and I needed to reserve the right to select our own

friends without feeling personally obligated to everyone in

the church.

To make these transitions, I needed to hand much of my workload to my elders and deacons so that I could continue to concentrate on the future expansion of our church. In some ways, I longed

for this day because it meant the weight of the church would be

off of my shoulders and shared with many leaders. In other ways, I

lamented not being able to invest in every young couple, experience

the joy of officiating at so many weddings, or know everything that

was going on in the church.

I asked our newest and oldest elder, Bent, to take over the counseling load that I had been carrying. He was the first person to

join our church who had gray hair, and he and his cute Filipino

wife, Joanne, were like rock stars with groupies since all the young

people wanted to hang out with these grandparents that loved Jesus.

My problem was I loved our people so much that if I got deeply

involved in the pain of too many people’s lives, it emotionally killed

me, and I needed to do less counseling.

I asked Lief to take over all of the premarital counseling and

weddings for me. I asked Jamie to manage the staff, the budget, and

all the hiring and firing. I also met with one of our newer elders,

and we decided that he should transition to a church we had helped

plant in the suburbs, because it was a better fit for him than where

we were going. By this point, Lief and I were the only founding

elders who remained at the church.

I simply stopped being the hub in the church around which

everything else revolved. I focused on reaching the city, raising

money, acquiring a building, leading the church, assisting church

planters, and training more leaders. I changed my email address so

that I could not be easily found and also changed my home phone

and cell phone numbers. I also informed my wife that we would

move to a new home because everyone knew where we lived and I

needed to be less accessible.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 151

02/03/06 11:45:02 AM

152 • Jesus, Today We Voted to Take a Jackhammer . . .

The elders unanimously approved the entire master plan, though

it cost almost every one of them personal power and gave them

much more work. The elders remained unified through this season

of enormous change as we took a jackhammer to the church we had

worked so hard to build.

Knowing that our church members would feel displaced and

would still need a way to connect, deacon Jason and a church member named Mark put together a password-protected website exclusively for church members, with discussion threads, classifieds,

prayer requests, and a directory. It soon became the buzzing hub of

our growing church.

One Sunday shortly after the elders had given their approval, I

notified the church of the plan. Despite the fact that we were losing Mike and three other elders as well as some deacons and key

families, shutting down two ministry homes, canceling a concert

venue, and transitioning from a church with seven Sunday ser vices

in three locations to one church with four ser vices in one location,

not one member scheduled a meeting with an elder to question

what we were proposing, and no one resigned membership during

the entire restart. Our members were clearly with us on the mission

and trusted their elders to lead them, which was very comforting

and reassuring.

We purchased a twenty-year-old, 40,000-square-foot former

hardware store Jamie had found in an industrial area two miles from

the old church that had been given to us. It was in a hip part of the

city, a short walk from the studio where Nirvana and other bands

recorded their albums. The purchase price was about $3.7 million,

and we needed to raise about $1 million for the construction costs

of getting it up to code. We pulled some of the equity out of our

small building. Our people put in thousands of hours of donated

labor and gave all the money they could. But we were still $120,000

short as we approached the end of the project, and we desperately

needed the money.

The elders had vowed not to hire a fundraising consultant or do

anything gimmicky to raise the money. So we called a rare church

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 152

02/03/06 11:45:03 AM

1,000 – 4,000 People • 153

meeting in the warehouse space, which had been gutted and was

filled with dust and unfinished projects. Tim played his guitar and

we all sang songs of worship. Jamie, Lief, and I each spoke to the

church, telling them our vision for the space and how much money

we needed. Jamie was to close the meeting in prayer. We did not

intend to take an offering that night. But as Jamie went up to pray,

someone pulled him aside and informed him that they would match

every dollar that people gave or pledged that night, up to $60,000.

Stunned, Jamie stood up and informed everyone.

The three hundred or so young and broke people present were

shocked. A buzz hit the room as people started talking, praying,

praising God, and emptying their pockets. We grabbed some buckets, and people gave their cash, wrote checks, and gave pledges. It

felt like one of those God moments in Acts, and our people were

filled with awe as God showed up in our midst. A lot of people

left in tears that night, and we rushed up to our offices to count

the offering. It totaled $60,000. With the matching pledge, it was

exactly what we needed.

We entered our new building in March of 2003 with about 1,600

people in attendance. Our first Sunday ser vice in the new building

opened in prayer to God, thanking him for the new building and

asking him to allow us to outgrow it as quickly as possible. As I had

done for the first launch of the church, I preached through Ecclesiastes, though I did a much better job this time because I connected

every sermon to Jesus. We soon settled in at about 1,200 people a

week between the two ser vices (10:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m.), in a room

that seated about 1,300 people.

When we opened the new facility, we couldn’t afford chairs, so

people brought their own, and we had an assortment of lawn chairs,

folding chairs, deck chairs, and dining chairs. Within a few months,

someone who remains anonymous to this day came one Sunday and

wrote a $20,000 check for new chairs. I think it was an angel.

Our sound system was woefully inadequate for the new space,

and on opening day of the new building, an entertainment mogul

grabbed Tim and me and pledged a new sound system. He also

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 153

02/03/06 11:45:03 AM

154 • Jesus, Today We Voted to Take a Jackhammer . . .

provided a wonderful Chris tian brother named Bill Platt, who had

been one of the chief sound designers for Disney, as our designer.

We were then given perhaps $500,000 worth of sound gear by one

kind and generous family.

Tim became the worship pastor and built an enormous department with multiple bands, lighting engineers, sound engineers, and

video camera operators. We even got a choir for holidays and a baptismal in which to dunk the new converts on Sundays.

Shortly thereafter, we caught a media buzz that included a

twelve-page feature on us in the Seattle Times, which led to me

becoming one of their new religion columnists.6 Since then, we

have received a lot of great press from local magazines, television

stations, and radio stations. The most curious article was in Seattle

magazine, which named me one of the twenty-five most powerful

people in Seattle, a big honor.7 Over the years, we have found that

by making friendly relationships with various media gatekeepers

and sending out press releases for story and photo opportunities,

we have received an overwhelming amount of positive local media

coverage in every medium from television to radio, magazines, and

newspapers, including some of the most extreme alternative-lifestyle and militant liberal publications.

We continually upgraded our Gospel Class membership process,

which grew to be as large as four hundred people a quarter. At the

end of the class, people may become members after an interview to

ensure they are saved, answer any final questions, and determine

where to plug them in for learning and ser vice. About half of the

people who take the class decide not to become members and often

leave the church because they disagree with our doctrines or with

aspects of our mission that we are simply unwilling to negotiate on.

Our membership has always equaled about one-third of our

Sunday attendance, since Sunday attendance includes non-Christians, people who are getting to know us well enough to decide if

they want to become members, and curious people just checking us

out. We also have a large number of pastors from other churches

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 154

02/03/06 11:45:03 AM

1,000 – 4,000 People • 155

attending our evening ser vices just for refreshment, which we welcome as a way to serve them.

Our ecclesiology seems to be working. Our present weekly

attendance has climbed from 1,200 to over 4,000 people in just two

years, and we have only six paid elders-pastors on staff, though that

number will be increasing. Though only in his midtwenties, Jamie

has become the executive pastor, has done a fabulous job running

the church, was elected as the president of the local chamber of

commerce by the business community, and was named one of the

top church administrators in the country.

Lief’s premarital class now prepares over one hundred couples

for marriage each year. Helping coordinate the weddings are ten

volunteer deacons led by a wonderful woman named Judy, who

came to Christ during the premarital class Grace and I hosted in

our home in the early days of the church.

Many of our couples are having fairly large families, which is

unusual in Seattle, which has less children than any U.S. city other

than San Francisco and more dogs than children.8 Our church is

averaging a few births every week, and our children’s ministry has

exploded under the leadership of a great married couple, Dick, who

is a pastor, and Tami, who is a deacon. Dick writes curriculum for

the kids, and our artists create the coloring sheets for the smaller

kids, all based on the same text that I am preaching from each week

so that families are studying a book of the Bible together. We still

transition children into the main ser vice as early as possible, ideally

before age ten.

We keep sending out church planters and use over 10 percent of

our general tithes and offerings to support church planters. Some

of our best and longest-term people go out with the new plants

because they have caught the missional bug. Steve Tompkins has

come on as a paid elder to oversee our church-planting ministry as

the director of the Acts 29 Network. 9 Steve is in his forties and is a

former church planter and senior pastor with two Master’s degrees

in theology. He had left formal ministry and was a faithful member

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 155

02/03/06 11:45:03 AM

156 • Jesus, Today We Voted to Take a Jackhammer . . .

of our church with his wise wife and two great kids before we hired

him. The first time I met Steve, he and his son Sam were picking

up trash after one of the church ser vices, which indicates Steve’s

humility and love for our church.

We have added a number of new elders. One of them is a very

bright young man in his twenties named Mike, who moved from

Joplin, Missouri, to Seattle to work at Microsoft. I have taught at

conferences in Joplin a few times and must report that it is among

the most peculiar places on earth. First, every item on every menu at

every restaurant comes covered in gravy. Second, the town is filled

with large fireworks stands because rednecks apparently like things

that blow up. Third, the big employer in town is FAG ball bearings,

and the town is filled with large white billboards that simply say

FAG in large black letters (I am not making this up). Anyway, Mike

has taken over our exploding small group ministry to finally organize it and give it sorely needed leadership. He is well-suited for the

position because it is growing and complicated and he is a problemsolving type of leader. Along with Mike, two new elders have risen

up to help build a sufficient number of home-based small groups.

Brad is a young engineer, and Dave is a longtime Navigators staff

member in his midsixties.

One of our young elders in his twenties, Gary, has started a free

Bible Institute called Capstone to better train our church members. Gary started attending the church when he was a student and

football player at the University of Washington. He was trained by

Mike Gunn and went on to finish his Master’s degree in theology.

Some people have been frustrated because we only allow members

to take classes, but we have simply held the line that we do not want

consumers receiving training from our leaders. We want to make

sure that people are Chris tians and are committed to our mission

before we are willing to invest in them to any significant degree.

Pastor Bent has launched a number of care and recovery groups

for such things as sexual abuse, sexual addiction, and alcoholism.

He is also training new elders to help shoulder this burden with

him. Among them is Phil, who was the first father to show up at our

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 156

02/03/06 11:45:03 AM

1,000 – 4,000 People • 157

church when we had less than forty people and who has risen up to

become a pastor.

Now that we have our own building, we are also able to host

conferences and large concerts. The highlight of these events was a

theology conference with Dr. John Piper speaking.10

Our elders, deacons, and church members are generally doing a

phenomenal job. If we were a typical consumer-based church that

pays people to minister to the congregation instead of a missional

church that pays leaders to equip the congregation to do ministry,

we would have to hire at least one hundred full-time people to make

up for the hours our people volunteer. For example, some weekends

we have as many as five thousand people come through the building

for various events. Amazingly, we do not have a paid janitor, and the

entire building is maintained by an army of volunteers.

Our musical style has broadened to include indie rock, rockabilly, folk, and old-school country and blues under Tim’s leadership.11 The worship experience in our big room has changed greatly,

from being a horizontal experience in which you know the people

leading worship from the stage and those singing around you to

being a vertical experience, in which the focus is more on personally connecting with God. Now that we also have video cameras, we

often baptize new converts and dedicate children, to keep the values

of new birth and birth before our people. The Sunday production

has gotten complicated enough to require a few hundred volunteers

at each of our four current ser vices (double the number we had upon

entering the building two years prior) to pull everything off and a

paid full-time event deacon, Jeff, to manage the mayhem.

Pastor James continues to lead our monthly film and theology

class, at which attendance rises to more than two hundred people

depending on the film. He continues to show an occasional unedited R-rated movie to train our people to think critically about the

themes preached through film, which is the new cultural form of

preaching. James also shows a G-rated family-friendly film periodically to train children to critically interpret what they watch so that

they too can be good missionaries in our culture.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 157

02/03/06 11:45:04 AM

158 • Jesus, Today We Voted to Take a Jackhammer . . .

Our outdoor ministry, which began in 1999 with Pastor Mike

before he went out to plant his own church, continues to host events

such as rock climbing, kayaking, snowshoeing, and other sports.

Today, unpaid church members run these events.

The Paradox was shut down for over a year until we got enough

money to remodel a warehouse portion of our new building as the

new Paradox. The new room is nicer and the sound equipment is

better than at the old venue. A businessman who does not attend our

church read about us in the Seattle Times, and after meeting with

me, he agreed to give us $5,000 a month for the first few months

of concerts at the new Paradox. This enabled Bubba, who was a

deacon and is now an elder, and his army of indie-rock volunteers,

many of whom are not yet Chris tians, to run a lot of free concerts

and draw the young fan base back to the shows. We also have the

big room, which has housed some very large concerts for more than

1,800 people. We also host a non-Chris tian jazz festival that boasts

some world-renowned musicians along with free clinics for young

student musicians, thereby providing us with a great opportunity to

practice hospitality to our city.

We also had to cancel our weekly summer outdoor Bible study,

which had been running since we were a handful of people, in

favor of multiple studies scattered in various parks around the

region. It had grown too large to fit in any of the city parks that

would welcome us. In our final year of the weekly all-church

summer study, we had baptisms in Lake Union, which overlooks the city, and the Seattle Times came out and took photographs. On the front page of the paper was an enormous photo

of us baptizing new converts with a backdrop of the skyline of

one of America’s least churched cities. But when we went to conduct more baptisms a few weeks later in the same location, the

harbor police showed up in their patrol boat, threatened to cite

us for being in city water, and made a mess of our baptism by

yelling at us through their bullhorn. We just ignored them and

kept baptizing the new converts. To be honest, it ticked me off.

In the same area where we were baptizing people, an annual sol0310270162_confess_rev.indd 158

02/03/06 11:45:04 AM

1,000 – 4,000 People • 159

stice parade is held for eco-whacko earth worshipers, complete

with a nudist bicycling team that no one complains about —

and we were getting yelled at by cops with bullhorns for conducting baptisms.

In addition to the many changes we have made, we have had to

repent of our idealism on two matters and start ministries we swore

we never would. When we started the church, I emphatically said

that we would only have age-integrated ministries because various life stages and generations are supposed to love each other as

the church, not be isolated from each other in departments of the

church. As a general rule, I still believe this and we still practice

it. But we now have a ministry for singles. And I am the primary

teacher in the high school ministry, which I repeatedly vowed we

would never have.

We still do not offer adult Sunday school classes, for four reasons.

First, such classes discourage people from bringing lost friends to

church because their friends likely would not want to attend both a

church ser vice and a more intimate class generally suited for Christians. Second, we believe community group Bible studies in homes

better suit our values of scattering around the region in the less

formal setting of a home, where multiple life stages and generations

can more easily coexist and lost neighbors can be reached for Jesus.

Third, we do not have enough classroom space or parking to simultaneously accommodate church ser vices and Sunday school classes,

and the high cost of real estate in our city makes it unlikely that

we ever will. Fourth, we want our evening classes to run for only a

quarter so that people can get formal teaching in classes as needed

but have ongoing relationships with people in community groups.

My role has also changed greatly. I make more time to study and

write and work from my home library. This is a tremendous help.

For the first time, I am able to separate my office at the church,

where I meet with people, and my study at home, where I research

and write. I now split the week between three days at the church for

meetings and ser vices and three days working from home, with one

day off. Over the years, I have discovered that a pastor needs both

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 159

02/03/06 11:45:04 AM

160 • Jesus, Today We Voted to Take a Jackhammer . . .

an office set up like a living room at the church for meetings and a

library at home for studying without constant interruption. I also

hired a male executive assistant, like Joseph, to work closely with

me, in an effort to not be yet another pastor with a sick story about

getting entangled with his assistant.

The many changes in my role came about through some lifechanging conversations. Just before we passed the three-thousand

mark, I met with a number of pastors who lead very large churches,

whom I met through Leadership Network, to glean insights from

them. No book has been written for churches of our size because

there are only about 425 churches in that range, according to a conversation I had with megachurch expert John Vaughan of Church

Growth Today, therefore no market exists for such a book.

Every pastor I met with mentioned one fact that was particularly

troubling. At each transition from one size barrier to another, one

of two things happens to a church. One, the lead pastor reorganizes the church and hands off more power and control to other

leaders, which means that some people are let go, while others are

reassigned or given less power than they were hoping for. Consequently, those people who are not kept at the center of power

become disgruntled, band together, and attempt to lead a coup,

which undermines the lead pastor. Two, the lead pastor senses the

resistance to change from his leaders and chooses not to make the

difficult decisions regarding reorganization and instead continues

to do too much, which leads to his burnout and breakdown. Indeed,

growing a church is often a lose-lose scenario.

In some of the worst scenarios I have seen, pastors completely

crack and have nervous breakdowns, work so many hours that their

marriages and families crumble, or venture into sin, such as drugs,

alcohol, and sex, for relief from the pressure.

One pastor I will not name particularly terrified me. He wanted

so badly to escape the pressure of ministry that he actually weighed

his options for self-destruction. He committed adultery with a

female church leader to get fired, have people hate him, and be done

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 160

02/03/06 11:45:04 AM

1,000 – 4,000 People • 161

with the church without having to deal with the pain of people trying to bring him back.

These sort of frank insights were terrifying and sobering. Over

the years, Grace and I had made great strides in our marriage, and

I had finally gotten my life in order so that I was generally healthy

physically, spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and financially. As

Mars Hill rocketed toward the four-thousand mark, I feared what

might happen to my children and my wife if the horror stories

I heard from the other pastors ahead of me became reality. So I

shifted my energies to developing other leaders, particularly fellow elders, who would work in the church so that I could work on

the church and plan for our future growth. The details of what we

learned and how we planned for healthy growth are the subject of

the next chapter.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 161

02/03/06 11:45:04 AM

162 • Jesus, Today We Voted to Take a Jackhammer . . .

Reformission Reflections

1. Is your church or ministry currently in the creative,

management, defensive justification, or blaming stage? Why do

you think so?

2. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being poor and 10 being excellent,

how well has your church or ministry done at raising up people

from within to lead? What should be done to improve this? Is

there a clear path for leadership development for those aspiring

to become leaders?

3. When is the last time your church or ministry took a big risk?

How did it turn out?

4. Is there any big risk that your church or ministry should be

taking in the near future?

5. Name one occasion when you saw God show up in such an

amazing way that it built your faith and filled you with awe.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 162

02/03/06 11:45:04 AM

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 163

02/03/06 11:45:04 AM

Jesus, We’re Loading

Our Squirt Guns

to Charge Hell Again

4,000 – 10,000 People

In the fall of 2004, Leadership Network brought together a handful

of large-church pastors for a meeting in New York. It was an honor

to be among such successful and diverse pastors as Wayne Cordero

(Foursquare), Tim Keller (Presbyterian), Michael Slaughter (Methodist), Walt Kallestad (Lutheran), and Matt Hannan and Bob Roberts (Baptist). Each of them had timely insights that helped clarify

the plans I was making to grow our church to ten thousand people.

During one of the breaks, I grabbed lunch with Larry Osborne, who

pastors North Coast, a church of six thousand people in San Diego,

California. Our church had quickly blown through the three thousand mark, and we were expecting to crest at just under four

thousand people a week by the fast-approaching spring of 2005.

I was in the middle of putting together a comprehensive strategic plan for the future of our church, with plans to grow to over

ten thousand people. Our two morning and two evening Sunday

ser vices were all filling up, and we needed to decide what our next

steps would be. We searched diligently but once again could not

find a facility with three thousand seats or more to rent in the city.

And we were unwilling to relocate the church out of the city, where

land was cheaper and more options were available.

As I sat with Larry, I immediately launched into a barrage of

questions about growing the church, hoping to maximize our time

together. Larry had impressively grown his church from a small

164

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 164

02/03/06 11:45:08 AM

4,000 – 10,000 People • 165

congregation to a church of six thousand people while maintaining

sound doctrine and incorporating an effective small group ministry.

Larry proceeded to ignore all of my questions and instead started

asking me questions seemingly unrelated to growing the church.

He asked me how many children I had, their ages, the condition

of my marriage, and if being a good husband and father was more

important to me than growing a large church.

I was stunned. Over the years, I had met with many successful

pastors to learn from them. Not one of them had ever asked anything about my personal life and my family or even if I was morally

fit to be a pastor. The only people who ever asked those types of

questions were my elders, because they love me and my family.

To be honest, I care very little whether I pastor a large church.

I enjoy my ministry very much, especially preaching the Bible and

helping young church planters chase their dreams. But far more

than anything that pertains to church work, I prefer taking my oldest daughter out for breakfast each Tuesday before school, bike riding with my oldest son, taking my middle son to the pet store to see

the animals, taking my youngest daughter on walks, cuddling with

my baby boy, and going out on our weekly date night with my wife,

who has been my love since we met at age seventeen.

I work hard and long hours but try to do as much work from

home as possible. I usually have dinner with my family every night

except Friday, which is my weekly date night with my wife, and

Sunday, because I’m preaching the evening ser vices.

Larry’s simple questions struck at the core of who I am. I am a

Chris tian first. Husband second. Daddy third. And pastor fourth. I

enjoy ministry, but I live for Jesus and my family. My sermons are

filled with comedic rants about my five kids (three boys and two

girls). I have learned over the years not to shelter my kids from my

work but instead to take them with me on hospital visits and such to

learn to share the gospel and pray for people, because my kids are

my first disciples and I enjoy them.

Larry talked openly about some hard days in his church over the

years and kindly asked me to build a church that I could pastor as

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 165

02/03/06 11:45:08 AM

166 • Jesus, We’re Loading Our Squirt Guns . . .

a healthy man with a healthy family for the rest of my life. He said

that as my children got older, they would need me at their games

and activities and that my energy level would diminish as I got

older, thereby not allowing me to keep the frantic pace I had set for

myself in my twenties.

As he spoke, I scribbled out pages of notes because the Holy

Spirit was speaking through my Chris tian brother, who was giving

me permission to do what I knew in my gut was right but felt guilty

for executing because it seemed selfish. But it had also dawned on

me that in many churches, everyone and everything is cared for

except the lead pastor and his family, who are not protected as an

important asset.

Larry warned me against creating a church that was essentially

a giant monster that would devour my joy, my marriage, and my

children. He explained how he was able to lead a large church while

still coaching his son’s sports teams without missing any games.

This really hit home for me because my dad was a union drywaller

who came home from backbreaking work every night to coach my

baseball team in his steel-toed boots and to spend time with his

three sons and two daughters. I wanted a life off the stage with

my wife and kids more than I wanted a life on the stage without

them.

Larry counseled me not to start the Saturday evening ser vice

that I was planning. His reasoning was that in a few years, my five

young kids would all be in school during the week and I would

be at church preaching all day on Sunday. This would leave only

Saturday as the one day each week that our whole family could be

together. If I preached a Saturday evening ser vice, I would spend

the day preparing and would give away the only day I had with my

family. Additionally, since most of our church leaders were getting

married and having children, they too would be sacrificing their

family time, and we would end up with a large church marked by

leaders with neglected marriages and children. His counsel was

tremendously helpful and saved me from returning to a new cycle

of unhealthy burnout, which I had spent the past years trying to

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 166

02/03/06 11:45:08 AM

4,000 – 10,000 People • 167

escape from. Simply, he was instructing me on the chief principles

for creating a mature missional church.1

So I tried to begin with the end in mind. I sought to plan for

our church for as far down the road as I could see. I could envision

a church of more than ten thousand people and began working with

Jamie to reverse-engineer a plan to become that church. We drafted

a strategic plan that was over a hundred pages long, between plans

and supporting documents and articles. We then presented our

strategic plan to the elders and deacons, who helped us make some

changes that greatly improved the plan. The deacons and elders

also devised strategic plans so that their areas of ministry could

grow with the church. If all of the plans were put together, the total

master plan would be hundreds of pages long.

Our strategic plan, which is sketched out in this chapter, won’t

be fully implemented until after this book is published. By that

time, we will know if we had a good plan or if we messed everything

up and reduced the church to a small group of people meeting in a

phone booth and grumbling about the strategic plan. I am hesitant

to end the book with these details because I have no guarantee that

they will work. But it’s where we are at, going into another season

of great risk.

Maturity is the point at which the senior leader(s) again calls the church

to the mission that Jesus has called them to accomplish. As a church

reaches maturity, it in some ways returns to a relaunching phase, in

which the church organizes itself for growth but in a very thoughtful and

wise way, seeking to maximize all their resources to achieve their goals.

Mature churches are known for such things as well-developed systems,

policies, procedures, communication forms (internal and external), and

leadership development tracts, which make it easy for ministry to be

done well. A mature church has all the zeal of an infant church but has

over time also learned how to conduct itself with the kind of wisdom that

makes the church most effective.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 167

02/03/06 11:45:08 AM

168 • Jesus, We’re Loading Our Squirt Guns . . .

One of the hardest parts of leading Mars Hill has been the steep

learning curve. This is the first church I have ever pastored or have

even been an official member of. Many of my staff and elders are

similarly inexperienced with a ministry of this size. We are growing so fast that systems are being outgrown before they are even

built. According to John Vaughan of Church Growth Today, the

typical church of four thousand generally takes many years to pass

the two-thousand barrier, as the following statistics show, and we

have accomplished that feat by God’s grace in just eight years from

a humble beginning of three couples and a few singles.2

One of the major difficulties in planning for our future is trying

to project our rate of future growth so that we can reverse-engineer the systems to care for that many people effectively while also

sending good people out to plant more churches. The trick is not

to expect too much and then hit a financial crisis or to expect too

little and burn out an insufficient staff. As we look down the road,

the following changes are on our immediate horizon, and I am sure

there are things we have missed and changes we will make to our

changes depending on what happens next. Whatever happens next,

we’ll pray for wisdom and figure it out. In the meantime, the following items are what I am burdened for in terms of our future.

How Long it Took Churches over 4,000 People

to Reach 2,000 in Attendance

A.

H.

B.

A. 1 – 4 Years

3%

B. 5 – 9 Years

15%

G.

C. 10 – 19 Years 43%

F.

D. 20 – 29 Years 12%

E. 30 – 39 Years

3%

E.

F. 40 – 49 Years

3%

G. 50 – 59 Years

6%

D.

H. 60+

Years

15%

C.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 168

02/03/06 11:45:09 AM

4,000 – 10,000 People • 169

More Prayerful Men

Functionally, my devotional life is a bit mystical, like Jonathan

Edwards’ was, so it would make most charismatic Chris tians happy

even though I’ve never spoken in tongues. I spend a lot of time in

prayer, silence, solitude, study, and the other contemplative disciplines to hear from and connect with Jesus. I do believe that God

is sovereign over all of life and that the Holy Spirit will guide me

through all of life if I walk in step with him. Corporately, however, I have struggled with how to more effectively implement

prayer churchwide. Right now we leave time in our church ser vice

for people to pray. We have prayer requests continually posted on

our church members’ website. People pray for one another in their

community groups. And after church, people can come forward for

prayer with a church leader.

But I do not believe we are praying as strategically as we could

or should be. So I am beginning an early morning prayer meeting

for our men before they head to work and am using that time to

keep them abreast of the most urgent needs in our city and church

so that they can pray together effectively. Also, with so many men

wanting to be closer to the center of the action in the church, the

prayer meeting will allow men motivated to become leaders to

prove their commitment by getting up early and marching forward

on their knees.

More Elders

If our church is to grow, we will need far more elders to care for

our people. The church is too big and there is too much going on

for one team of elders to manage the church’s daily operations and

plan for the future. Even the simple task of officiating weddings for

a church of ten thousand young people is nearly impossible unless

there is an army of pastors since the projected number of weddings

is equivalent to one every day of the year. The problem, however, is

that when there are more than eight or ten elders, the management

and unity of the elders is nearly impossible to maintain.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 169

02/03/06 11:45:09 AM

170 • Jesus, We’re Loading Our Squirt Guns . . .

The New Testament is very clear on the functions of elders

(leading, disciplining, teaching, shepherding, praying, etc.) and the

qualifications of an elder (e.g., 1 Tim. 3:1 – 7; Titus 1:5 – 9).3 But the

New Testament is not clear on how the elders should be organized

because the form must be adapted for the various cultures that have

now had church elders for two thousand years. Therefore, the New

Testament does not tell us how many elders a local church should

have, how often they should meet, how they should conduct their

vote (e.g., unanimity, consensus, majority), or how they should be

organized. The New Testament assumes that qualified elders who

love God’s people will organize themselves according to the leading

of the Holy Spirit.

So I began researching the various ways we could organize our

elders, reading a great number of books and meeting with a number

of pastors from larger churches. A great deal could be said about

leading an elder team, and I hope to write a book on this subject, but

here I will simply summarize some of the more pertinent points.

Options for Elder Organization

Elder Organization Option 1: A Closed Number of Elders

In this format, the number of elders has a set maximum, and like

musical chairs, once the seats are filled, no new elders are appointed

until a position opens up.

Pros

Cons

• A small and static number of elders

• The elders may become overworked.

is easier to manage.

• The people may suffer if membership

• Quick decision-making is possible.

grows and the number of elders does

not.

• The church is unable to grow

because of a lack of leadership.

• Men unable to become elders

may leave to seek opportunities

elsewhere, taking energy and ideas

with them and leaving an aging and

static leadership elder team.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 170

02/03/06 11:45:09 AM

4,000 – 10,000 People • 171

Elder Organization Option 2: An Open Number of Elders

In this format, the number of elders is not limited, which allows

for a very large team of elders. The elders all function as equals and

vote on issues pertaining to the leadership of the church.

Pros

Cons

• The leadership may develop an

• Managing multiple elders is difficult.

unlimited number of elders.

• Keeping unpaid elders up to speed

• Young men from within the church

on all the issues is difficult.

can rise up to become elders.

• Decision-making is a slower process.

• Arranging times when everyone can

meet becomes very difficult.

• Every elder is expected to be a

generalist and keep up with the

whole church.

• Having real community between

all of the men and between their

families is very difficult.

Elder Organization Option 3: Rotating Terms

In this format, paid elders continually serve as elders but unpaid

elders rotate on and off the team after serving set terms (e.g., two

to three years).

Pros

Cons

• The leadership may develop many

• Managing a large number of elders

elders but keep a smaller board.

and their rotations is difficult.

• Getting new elders up to speed on

existing projects is difficult.

• Building momentum and continuity

is difficult with fixed term lengths.

• Elders who do not rotate hold more

power than those who do.

Elder Organization Option 4: Split Elder and Pastor Roles

In this format, a distinction is made between an elder, who is

unpaid (often a skilled businessman) and a pastor, who is paid. The

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 171

02/03/06 11:45:09 AM

172 • Jesus, We’re Loading Our Squirt Guns . . .

unpaid elders have authority over the paid pastors, though some

pastors, such as the senior pastor, could also be elders.

Pros

Cons

• Pastors don’t have to deal with as

• A distinction should not be made

many business issues and can focus

between elders and pastors (e.g.,

on shepherding people.

Acts 20:27 – 28; 1 Peter 5:1 – 2).

• Authority lines become very unclear,

and conflict between the elders and

pastors is likely.

• The most theological men do not

have the most authority.

• The leaders most closely connected

to the people in the church do not

make the final decisions for their

care.

In the end, I was not impressed with any of these options for

our growing church. So I proposed that we needed to have both

one large elder team that made churchwide decisions and various

smaller elder teams making decisions for their ministry areas in the

church. There is precedence for a large team of elders. Some historians have suggested that the church in Jerusalem may have had

seventy elders since that was the number of members in the Jewish

Sanhedrin. It seemed obvious that if we wanted our elders to do

the duties of a New Testament pastor, we would perhaps need that

many elders if our church continued to grow.

But the thought of having seventy generalists voting on every

detail of church business sounded like an arduously slow death by

committee. So while we wanted to have as many elders as God

would raise up, we also needed to find a way to manage which issues

they would vote on so that things did not continually bottleneck

with the elders. This led to a lot of discussion among our elders

about what we would vote on as an entire team and what percentage

would be required for a proposal to be approved.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 172

02/03/06 11:45:09 AM

4,000 – 10,000 People • 173

Options for Elder Voting

As I studied, only two real options surfaced. Both options would

be a major change from our previous way of operating. Until this

point, every elder had voted on every matter. Each of our options

eliminated one or the other variable so that not every elder voted

or every elder voted but not on every matter. These two options are

summarized below.

Elder Voting Option 1: Voting and Non-Voting Elders

In this format, we could have a very large elder board that would

be present at every meeting and free to speak on the issues, but only

some elders (e.g., between four and eight) would vote on churchwide matters.

Pros

Cons

• The church benefits from the input

• A discrepancy in power is created

of all the elders on various issues.

between voting and non-voting

• The church benefits from having

elders, which could lead to conflict

multiple elders.

among the elders.

• The elder team benefits from

needing fewer people to meet for

a vote and to agree for action to

be taken.

Elder Voting Option 2: Delineated Voting

In this scenario, all elders would vote, but only on selected issues

vital to the health of the entire church. All other issues would be

voted on by teams of elders overseeing their particular areas of ministry. For example, over the worship department, biblical counseling

department, small groups department, administration department,

church planting department, and so on, would be teams of elders

who would lead and govern their ministry areas. These smaller

teams of elders would meet separately from the entire elder board

to vote on their area of ministry without needing to involve all of

the elders. The only issues that would require a vote from all of the

elders would be as follows:

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 173

02/03/06 11:45:10 AM

174 • Jesus, We’re Loading Our Squirt Guns . . .

• Theology — the adoption of a new doctrine or alteration of

an existing doctrine.

• Property — the purchase or sale of a facility or property.

• Eldership — the approval or discipline of a fellow elder.

• Sites — the opening or closing of a new ministry site.

• Budget — the gross budget (not each line item).

• Other — any other written proposal drafted by any elder can

be brought before all the elders, providing it is approved by

the moderating elder.

In this scenario, all frontline ministry decisions would be made

by the smaller elder teams and would not come before all of the

elders unless proposed and approved by the moderating elder, who

functions as the gatekeeper to prevent elders from dropping issues

into the meetings without prior approval. Smaller working teams of

elders would also be brought together for specific projects according to their spiritual gifts and experience. These teams would generate proposals, which would then be considered by all the elders.

Examples of such projects would include:

• staff salaries

• hiring and firing of paid deacons and other paid staff

• annual elder performance reviews

• budget line items

• real estate acquisitions

As we considered this seemingly innovative way of organizing

our elders, the benefits and risks became evident.

In the end, our elders voted to not limit the size of the elder

team or impose term limits for elders and adopted Elder Voting

Option 2 to maintain order and efficiency. This decision could easily have split the elder team. Thankfully, a great deal of prayer and

thoughtful discussion among the elders preceded these decisions

and was very helpful in increasing our unity and loving trust. This

experience was incredibly encouraging to me because each elder

laid down his interests to do what was best for the whole church

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 174

02/03/06 11:45:10 AM

4,000 – 10,000 People • 175

Pros

Cons

• The church can have a large number

• If the elders are not unified and

of elders.

communicating, the departmental

• The departmental elder teams can

elder teams could turn into divisive

make decisions quickly.

factions.

• Each elder has a realm of great

• If the lead pastor does not provide

authority and responsibility.

clear, unifying leadership, the overall

elder team could fragment.

• The most informed people can make

decisions without having to catch

other elders up to speed.

because he believed it was the will of Jesus, our Senior Pastor. My

pastoral duties now reside mainly in caring for a church of over seventy people — the elders and their wives and children.

More Technology

Our main website has successfully become our new front door, and

our members’ website has become our new living room. Currently,

our main website is version 3.5 and is on pace for over one million

annual MP3 downloads of free sermons and live recordings of our

worship bands. Our password-protected members’ website has over

1,200 users and over 30,000 postings on over 4,000 topics.

To serve our growing church in Microsoftville, we need to

increase not only the physical capacity of our church but the digital

capacity as well. Our software worked well when our church was

smaller but is now incapable of keeping up, particularly as we prepare to transition to multiple locations and to have pastors working

remotely from home.

The increased complexity of keeping track of thousands of people

led our lead tech deacons, Jason and Chad, who both came to faith

at the church, to research our options. They recommended to the

elders a web portal technology that retails for around $800,000 and

runs large corporations and state governments. After negotiating a

lower price, we obtained the money from the sale of the old small

church building and did not take the money from general tithes and

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 175

02/03/06 11:45:10 AM

176 • Jesus, We’re Loading Our Squirt Guns . . .

offerings. I personally use technology just fine but cannot troubleshoot anything beyond an Etch-A-Sketch. I won’t try to explain

the technology but will simply report that when we approved it, the

tech guys started acting like Green Bay Packer fans after a playoff

victory, so it must be good. We are hoping that it works so that we

won’t have to sell it for three dollars at a church garage sale.

More Facilities

Our current facility cannot accommodate much growth beyond

our current four Sunday ser vices. Additionally, our kids’ ministry is

bursting at the seams, our Capstone classes are in desperate need of

space, and our cramped, windowless office space would be perfect if

we were a third-world sweatshop.

So the elders voted to purchase a 43,000-square-foot dumpy

warehouse Jamie found one block away from our current building.

When the project is completed, we will have two buildings only a

block apart, each hosting church ser vices, with 1,300 seats in one

location and a projected 1,000 seats in the other. We will be able to

grow to more than 10,000 people per Sunday through multiple services in multiple locations. Each ser vice will have live worship teams,

but I will only be live in some ser vices and on video in the others.

Some of our people are mildly unhappy about watching me

preach on video instead of live because they feel it isn’t very authentic. But in our current worship space, about half of the people sit

so far away from the stage that they watch me on a video screen

anyway.

Personally, I really like having the option of preaching only one

sermon and videotaping it so that the rest of the day is covered in

case of emergency. For example, I nearly didn’t make it through a

Sunday in the winter of 2005. I fell asleep on Saturday night and

woke up at 1:00 a.m. with a flu bug that I had caught from my kids.

That night, I ate a plate of nachos the size of a small Latin nation

and spent the rest of the night throwing them up. I did not sleep for

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 176

02/03/06 11:45:10 AM

4,000 – 10,000 People • 177

the rest of the night but did develop a nasty case of diarrhea, which

left me dehydrated and exhausted.

The next day I felt that getting sent to hell would be an upgrade.

I had managed to get about a combined hour of sleep between fluid

launches out of various orifices like a human sprinkler. I preached

with a barf bucket on the stage and told the sound guy that if I

reached for the bucket, to turn my microphone off so that I did not

barf over the sound system. My fear was that I would set off a chain

reaction and turn our church into a neo-Roman vomitorium.

After the first ser vice, a kind pharmacist brought me enough

medications to piece me together, and it seemed I had a shot of actually making it through the day. Occasionally the barf would come

up my throat, and I would just swallow hard and sort of eat it so that

I could keep preaching, which was particularly delightful.

Knowing that I had four ser vices to preach and that each sermon lasted about an hour, I was feeling optimistic during the third

ser vice — until I crapped myself about fifteen minutes into the sermon and was left with a terrible dilemma. Do I finish the sermon

and just not move much on the stage? Do I say something spiritual,

like the Holy Spirit just notified me that everyone is to break up

into prayer groups, so I could sneak off and clean up the oil slick?

They don’t cover this part of the job in seminary, and I was perplexed but chose to just keep going and finish the sermon, which

took about another forty-five minutes, during which time I tried

to breath out of my mouth to lessen the stench. This glorious day

helped to convince me that videotaping the first sermon so that it

could be shown at later ser vices in case of emergency was a wise

move.

More Parking

We have never had adequate parking in the history of our church,

and the future appears to be no different. Parking has become our

biggest dilemma to tackle.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 177

02/03/06 11:45:10 AM

178 • Jesus, We’re Loading Our Squirt Guns . . .

More Security

As one of the largest churches in our state, we are a lightning rod

for yahoos and various mixed nuts with an ax to grind or a desire to

make the nightly news. Among them is a guy from Montana who

hears voices telling him to take me out, which does not sound good.

Without sounding paranoid, I also believe that larger churches are

some of the softest potential terrorist targets in America. To make

things safer, we have had to implement a security team in addition

to having an off-duty police officer on-site.

More Training

I once read a pithy quote from Chuck Smith, who founded the

Calvary Chapel movement. He said that most churches called the

trained, but their churches trained the called. This simple distinction is profoundly important. The traditional model of ministry is

that a person goes to seminary and is trained for ministry. Once

they have completed their training and have passed their ordination

exams, they are called into ministry by a church or denomination.

As Smith said, it is much wiser for someone to be overseen by

leaders in a church who confirm that God has called them into

ministry. Then, once their call has been confirmed, they should be

trained by doing ministry in their church.

This point was reinforced by Dr. John Piper.4 He encouraged

me to make time for theological education and writing because

each generation needs to define and defend Chris tian orthodoxy for

themselves. His encouragement was wise and has helped me to validate in my own mind the need to make time for further education,

study, and writing. So, though our church leaders nearly all began

as new converts who were self-taught, our elders are now pursuing

further education while working at Mars Hill, and I am finishing a

degree at Western Seminary.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 178

02/03/06 11:45:11 AM

4,000 – 10,000 People • 179

More Staff

In my conversations with pastors of large churches, the general rule

of thumb seems to be that a staff member should be added to the

church every time the Sunday attendance grows by roughly 130 to

150 people. We have in no way kept up with this pace and at times

grow by as many as 500 people in one week for no discernable reason, which means that we are always understaffed.

We have always been reticent to add staff too quickly because we

fear it may detract from the unpaid members of the church who are

doing the ministry. We also do not want to hire prematurely in case

our growth slows down, thereby leaving us financially short. We

generally wait until a ministry had grown so large that a clear leader

has emerged and then hire that person to expand the ministry. We

have seen that this method of hiring also reduces our financial risk,

since by the time we hire people, they have often grown such a large

ministry that they have in effect raised their own salaries.

As we prepare for future growth, we have, however, identified

some strategic hires that will need to be made, and we expect our

staff to double within a year. One thing we still require of everyone

we hire is a sense of awe and gratitude that they are privileged to

work at Mars Hill and be a part of what God is doing by the power

of his gospel. At this phase, we can’t tolerate employees who are

simply working a job.

More Money

In churches whose attendees are mostly young people, annual giving to the general fund is generally somewhere between $1,000 and

$1,500 per adult of the average Sunday attendance. Therefore, a

church comprised of largely young people that averages one hundred adults per Sunday should expect to have an annual general

fund budget of roughly $100,000 to $150,000.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 179

02/03/06 11:45:11 AM

180 • Jesus, We’re Loading Our Squirt Guns . . .

We have had to labor to train our people to work hard, budget

wisely, invest smartly, spend carefully, and tithe generously. Pastor

Jamie and a team of members, skilled in everything from life insurance to real estate and investing, conduct classes and seminars to

teach our people how to be good stewards. Additionally, one week

of our Gospel Class is devoted to the issue of stewardship.

We keep everyone informed via weekly email of exactly where

we are at financially and have taken the subject of money and simply made it part of our church family discussions. For our people to

own our mission, they also must own our expenses.

Getting young people to give regularly to their church has

proven to be incredibly difficult across the nation. George Barna

says, “Only 3 out of 10 twentysomethings donated to a church in

the past year, which is half the proportion of older adults (30% to

61%). (While twentysomethings generally have smaller income levels than their older counterparts, this measure has nothing to do

with how much the person donates, but whether they contribute

financially at all to churches.) This reluctance to commit financially suggests that churches attracting an exclusively young adult

audience will be especially hard-pressed to raise sufficient funds for

ministry. ” 5

At Mars Hill, the elders have chosen not to pass the offering

plate during the church ser vice. Instead, we offer people the following ways to give:

• We can set up a regularly scheduled deduction from their

bank accounts.

• They can pay online via debit card.

• They can send a check to the office.

• They can put cash or a check in the offering boxes posted

near the exits.

• They can place their gift in a basket when they come forward

for communion each week.

About 60 percent of people who attend our church contribute

financially to our church. The remaining 40 percent include many

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 180

02/03/06 11:45:11 AM

4,000 – 10,000 People • 181

non-Chris tians, visitors, and people just checking us out. To make

these people feel welcomed, we clearly state from the pulpit each

week that if someone is a non-Chris tian or a visitor, we do not want

them to give because they are our guests.

Although our members are roughly only 30 percent of our total

Sunday attendance, they provide roughly 60 percent of our budget.

And since we implemented an annual church member giving pledge

some years ago, member giving has exceeded member pledges every

year, and for the past few years, we have ended the budget year

above budget. Our financial situation has greatly improved, as our

weekly offering now surpasses the total offering that we received in

our entire first year.

More Member Care

As the church grows, our pastors and leaders are getting swamped

with new people who have very real and urgent needs because

they are lost, addicted, perverted, and the like. It is probable that

the waves of new people that keep pounding our shore will overwhelm our ability to care for both them and our existing church

members.

So a large team of elders and deacons will use our new technology to track our members and ensure that they are connected,

serving, giving, and in a learning and/or care group. In this way, we

hope to preemptively help our members to live healthy and fruitful

lives and avoid crises brought on by sin that went undetected for

too long.

This means that it is vital to continually increase our small

group ministry at a very rapid rate to keep up with the growth of

the church. As we get bigger, we must also get smaller with hundreds of small home community groups, in which people will be

known, loved, and sharing the gospel with lost friends.

Additionally, we are recording the Gospel Class and burning it

on DVD to enable people to become members by watching the lectures in a home-based community group setting. This will allow us

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 181

02/03/06 11:45:11 AM

182 • Jesus, We’re Loading Our Squirt Guns . . .

to raise up members wherever and whenever they can meet in small

enough numbers for people to actually get to know one another

instead of having everyone sit anonymously in a class of over four

hundred people and wait for a personal interview at the end of the

class.

More Church Planting

If you threw a dart at a map of Washington and did not hit water,

a church plant is needed there because our state is among the least

churched in the nation.6 Honestly, I am glad that more people don’t

go to church in Seattle, because if they did, they would likely end

up at churches led by pastors who are going to hell with their gay

partners. Things are so bad that even two Baptist churches have

gay pastors, and when the Baptists are gay, a city is officially lost.

In the past decade, the greater Seattle area did see a net gain of

134 churches, but to keep up with the corresponding population

growth, 456 more churches would have been needed in 2000.7

To help grow not only our church but also the wider church, we

have brought on three full-time staff members to help with church

planting because a church simply cannot be missional unless it is a

church-planting church. We house the central office for the Acts 29

Network, which helps locate, assess, train, and deploy church planters around the nation and world, including over a dozen churches in

our own region thus far. We give over 10 percent of our general giving to help support church planters because our prayer is to assist in

the planting of one thousand churches.

More Kindness

When we started the church, I was full of pride, and by God’s

grace, I am now down to perhaps half a tank. I routinely critiqued

the work of other men, particularly older men who had faithfully

served Jesus by reaching modern and suburban types of people. It

was typical young-buck-in-rutting-season folly.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 182

02/03/06 11:45:11 AM

4,000 – 10,000 People • 183

But now that I’ve had a few years of ministry beatings, I am

increasingly grateful for the Chris tian leaders whom Jesus is using

even if they are considerably different from me. Over the years, I

have had the unpleasant experience of being widely misunderstood,

gossiped about, and criticized. For some reason, the perception has

gotten out that I walk around with no pants on with a handgun

in my underwear strap, drinking beer, eating meat, and screaming

random verses out of the King James Bible.

Not knowing if I should respond to various wild rumors or ignore

them, I sought the counsel of a more seasoned pastor. I emailed Rick

Warren, assuming that he is now so big that he must wear a cup all

the time just to get through an average day. He said that when your

church is small, people ignore you; when your church is growing,

people take credit for your success; and when your church gets big,

people criticize and attack you. He then said the key was to simply

remember that you work for an audience of one and to love everyone

and not get off your mission of serving Jesus alone. His words rang

true and convicted me to be kinder to other pastors who misunderstand what we are doing, because we are still one big dysfunctional

church family under the same Father. To help build bridges of love

and ser vice to other local pastors, we now host a quarterly time of

free training and networking over a meal, which is usually attended

by over one hundred leaders from various churches.

More Pruning

It is my deepest desire to be fruitful for Jesus. And according to his

frequent kingdom parables, fruit comes not simply by growing but

by his strategic pruning. Jesus prunes us through hardship, suffering, failure, loss, discipline, and pain. I have found Jesus’ pruning of

my life, marriage, family, and church to be incredibly painful, but

it always results in bigger, sweeter, and greater fruit. Some pruning

has been so overwhelming that I did not know if I could endure it

and even questioned the goodness of God despite my knowledge of

Scripture, which led to bouts of despair and anger.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 183

02/03/06 11:45:12 AM

184 • Jesus, We’re Loading Our Squirt Guns . . .

I wish I did not have to suffer demonic attacks that include seeing raw and real footage of the times my people were raped and

molested that plays in my mind like a film even though I was not

present. I wish I did not have to sometimes struggle so mightily to

be intimate with my wife. I wish I did not feel so completely alone,

especially when I am in a crowd. I wish I was not a target for critics who seem to put me on a pedestal only to get a better aim. I

wish I did not have the responsibility of standing before God to

give an account for the church that I lead. I wish I did not have

to continually weep while watching people I dearly love shipwreck

their faith and lives through folly, rebellion, sin, hard-heartedness,

and deception. I wish I never had to climb on another airplane to

go preach the gospel, because the picture of my children crying as

I drive away haunts me while I am away from them. I wish I knew

the future and how Jesus will prune me next so that I could wince

to lessen its sting before the blow lands. But Jesus has called me

to trust him by faith and to endure more pruning so that more

fruit can be harvested for his kingdom. And for this reason, it is my

deepest wish that Jesus keep pruning me, because I love him, want

to be with him, want to be like him, and enjoy being on mission

with him more than anything.

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.

Amen.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 184

02/03/06 11:45:12 AM

4,000 – 10,000 People • 185

Reformission Reflections

1. If you were to write a strategic plan for your church or ministry,

how many people would you prepare for? What three things

would you recommend stopping because they are not working?

What three things would you recommend trying to begin?

2. How has God pruned your church or ministry in the past?

3. How is God pruning your church or ministry in the present?

4. In your opinion, what are the worst things the key leaders in

your church or ministry suffer through?

5. Has your church or ministry ever helped to start a new church?

What can be done to encourage your church or ministry to

help start new churches that bring Jesus to lost people in your

area and around the world?

6. Name one or two of the most painful seasons of pruning God

has brought you through and the fruit that has resulted from

those experiences.

7. What will you do differently now that you have read this book?

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 185

02/03/06 11:45:12 AM

031020755X_relation_fm.qxp 9/8/06 2:21 PM Page 1

This page is intentionally left blank

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 187

02/03/06 11:45:12 AM

The Junk Drawer

Answers to Common Questions

Why is there laughter in church at Mars Hill?

At Mars Hill, we take joy very seriously. Joy comes from God (Ps.

16:11), and joy makes us strong (Neh. 8:10). People who are close

to God are filled with joy, and this joy enables them to get through

the toils of life and laugh at the days to come like the wise woman

in Proverbs 31:25. In Scripture, we see that Sarah laughed at the

thought of getting pregnant in her old age (Gen. 18:13 – 15) and

that God got the last laugh as Abraham and Sarah named their son

Isaac, which means “laughter” (Gen. 21:1 – 6). We also see that there

are times for laughter (Eccl. 3:4) and that sometimes the best thing

to do is to laugh through our tears (Prov. 14:13). We also see the

prophets and even Jesus using irony and sarcasm to convict people

of sin and show how foolish sin is (e.g., Isa. 44:12 – 20; Matt. 19:24;

23:24). We also see that God laughs at the wicked, who in their folly

disobey him to their own demise (Pss. 2:4; 37:13; 59:8). In summary,

people are prone to taking themselves too seriously and God and

their sin too lightly, so at Mars Hill, we use irony and sarcasm to

learn to laugh at ourselves and to laugh with God because people

are nuts and good comedic fodder.

Why does Mars Hill partake

of communion every week?

In the early church, communion, also called the Lord’s Supper, was

accompanied by sincere introspection and repentance of one’s sins

(1 Cor. 11:17 – 34). During the first few years of our church, we did

188

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 188

02/03/06 11:45:12 AM

The Junk Drawer: Answers to Common Questions • 189

not partake of communion every week until we were studying the

Passover from the book of Exodus and became convinced that it

would be best to have the gospel of Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection for our sins as the center point of our church ser vice to

ensure that everyone was compelled to repentance of sin and faith

in Jesus each week.

Why does Mars Hill sing songs

I have never heard before?

The Bible tells us to sing “psalms, hymns and spiritual songs” (Eph.

5:19; Col. 3:16). And the Bible repeatedly tells us to sing new songs

to the Lord (e.g., Pss. 33:3; 40:3; 144:9; 149:1; Isa. 42:10; Rev. 5:9;

14:3). Because God is our Creator who has made us in his image

and likeness, it is important that we be creative. At Mars Hill, we

enjoy singing from the Psalms, from other Scriptures that we set

to music, older hymns that we have redone, as well as from a large

library of songs that our own musicians have composed out of their

love for God. Because of the richness of the resources God has

given our church in the areas of songwriting and composition, we

are blessed by an abundance of talent and creativity, for which we

thank God and our artists.

How are children incorporated into worship

at Mars Hill?

In the Old Testament when God’s people would gather together,

children were commonly included ( Josh. 8:35; 2 Chron. 20:13; 31:16;

Ezra 8:21; Neh. 8:2; 12:43). In the Old Testament, we see children

commanded to worship God (Pss. 8:2; 148:12). We see Jesus as a

child worshiping at the temple and learning with the adult men

(Luke 2:46). In the time of Jesus, we also see children worshiping

Jesus (Matt. 21:15 – 16), children being welcomed into his presence

even though some adults felt they were a distraction to be kept away

(Matt. 19:13 – 15), and Jesus telling us that we have a lot to learn from

children (Matt. 18:1 – 6).

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 189

02/03/06 11:45:12 AM

190 • Confessions of a Reformission Rev.

When children are quite young, it is admittedly difficult for them

to sit through a church ser vice, so we do provide a program during

church for small children. This program includes age-appropriate

prayer, Bible teaching, and worship. Our goal, however, is to have

the children join the congregation for worship as young as possible,

and we leave the timing of this up to the parents, although all children are encouraged to join us after the sermon for communion and

worship no matter how young they are.

Why is no one speaking in tongues

during the church ser vice?

The issue of tongues is very controversial and divisive in many

churches, and thankfully it has never been so at Mars Hill. The

elders do not believe that the gift of tongues has ceased but believe

that it is often not done in a biblical way. Mars Hill has leaders and

members who speak in tongues, as well as leaders and members who

do not. What Paul does forbid regarding tongues, however, is speaking in tongues out loud during a church ser vice because visitors and

non-Chris tians will not know what is being said, will think we are

nutjobs, and would be better served by convicting Bible teaching so

they can get saved (1 Cor. 14:12 – 25).

Are the Mars Hill pastors ordained?

The concept of ordination is man-made and finds no biblical backing in the Scriptures. Therefore, while the concept of ordination

may not necessarily be bad, it is also not necessary. The closest

thing we see in the New Testament to ordination is when the elders

of a church laid hands on new leaders and commissioned them into

church leadership (1 Tim. 4:14; 5:22). At Mars Hill, we do commission our new leaders into ministry by publicly laying hands on them

and praying over them.

While the Bible does not require ordination, it does require that

we obey the laws of our nation and state (Rom. 13:1 – 7). Our state

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 190

02/03/06 11:45:13 AM

The Junk Drawer: Answers to Common Questions • 191

government requires each church to license its pastors to do such

things as conduct weddings, and Mars Hill follows these state laws

and licenses each of our elder-pastors.

How are church leaders held accountable?

In an age of incredible sin among pastors, some of it very public and

damaging to the reputation of Chris tian ity, this is a vitally important question. At Mars Hill, we answer this question with a multilayered answer.

First, an elder must fear God and be accountable to him. Simply,

if any Chris tian, including a pastor, does not fear God and walk

closely with Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit, there is truly

nothing that can be done to keep him or her from sin.

Second, an elder must be accountable to his wife if he is married.

No one knows how a man is truly doing better than his wife, and

an elder’s wife must be an exemplary woman who helps her husband

by speaking truthfully and respectfully to him about the condition

of his heart and life.

Third, an elder must be accountable to the other elders. At Mars

Hill, the elders are in close relationships of accountability. Our

wives are also close to each other and are given the freedom to speak

openly about the condition of their marriages and homes with one

another so that sin among our elder team is difficult to hide.

Fourth, our elders are in relationship locally with a number of good

Bible-teaching churches. Additionally, our elders are in relationship

nationally with other pastors who are part of the Acts 29 Network.1

We regularly speak and meet with many of these pastors, whom we

love and with whom we have open, mutual accountability.

Fortunately, we have never had to discipline an elder for any sin

because the closeness of our relationships brings potential issues

to the surface before they manifest. Should an elder ever sin grievously, we would quickly discipline him according to the biblical

directives (1 Tim. 5:19 – 21).

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 191

02/03/06 11:45:13 AM

192 • Confessions of a Reformission Rev.

How does someone become

an elder at Mars Hill?

The Bible teaches that it is God the Holy Spirit who ultimately

selects the elders in the local church (Acts 20:28). Additionally,

elders should not serve because of external compulsion (1 Peter

5:2), which is why we do not take congregational nominations for

elders at Mars Hill. Instead, the Bible teaches that someone should

become an elder because of internal compulsion given to them by

God (1 Tim. 3:1; 1 Peter 5:2).

Practically, this means that someone desiring to be an elder at

Mars Hill must first be a faithful member of the church. Then he

speaks with one of the elders about his desire, and that elder assesses

whether he is qualified for leadership according to the biblical criteria. If the elder does believe the man is qualified to be an elder, his

nomination is brought before the entire group of elders, who must

unanimously agree that the man is called of God and qualified to

be brought through a slow process of testing (1 Tim. 3:10; 5:22).

This process takes at least one year and requires that the potential

candidate study, articulate in writing his doctrine and the area of

ministry he hopes to lead, undergo an investigation of his family

condition, and other things. After the lengthy process is concluded,

the candidate is considered for eldership only if all the elders agree

that he should be an elder. The elder candidate is then brought

before the church, and if anyone should for any reason believe he is

not qualified, we cancel his nomination if there are grounds to do

so. If the man passes this lengthy process and is approved by the

elders, deacons, and church members, he is then brought before the

church with his family, and the elders lay hands and pray over him

to commission him as an elder. Such men are generally still not paid

to lead in the church, though at some point they may be employed

by the church if the need arises.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 192

02/03/06 11:45:13 AM

The Junk Drawer: Answers to Common Questions • 193

How does someone become a deacon

at Mars Hill?

Deacons are appointed by the elders and deacons according to the

biblical qualifications and according to the needs of the church.

The process of becoming a deacon is similar to that of an elder but

takes less time to complete and is open to qualified women as well

as men.

Do elders and deacons at Mars Hill

serve terms?

We see no precedent in Scripture for placing time limitations on

our leaders (e.g., three-year terms). Additionally, serving terms

causes turnover, which makes for discontinuity in decision-making

and oversights because projects, people, and needs in the church

do not magically go away every three years to allow new leaders to

take over.

Our elders are expected to give their lives to ser vice in our

church unless they are called by God to serve elsewhere, they

should disqualify themselves in some way, or they are simply unable

to perform their duties due to such reasons as health. We do, however, grant elders seasons of Sabbath as needed.

Some deacons are appointed to specific tasks, and so once their

task is completed, they do not continue as a deacon unless they are

assigned to another task. Some deacons serve until life circumstances such as marriage, the birth of a child, or a move require

them to step down as deacons. Still other deacons are overseeing

areas of ministry that are ongoing and will remain in their position

indefinitely.

What should someone do if they disagree

with how Mars Hill is led?

We encourage those who may disagree with us to a significant

degree to examine all their beliefs regarding church government

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 193

02/03/06 11:45:13 AM

194 • Confessions of a Reformission Rev.

by studying Scripture because we are convinced that our church is

operating according to the principles of the Bible.

If, after serious study, they should disagree with us to the degree

that they cannot submit to our leaders and operate within our

church structures, we encourage them to find a church in which

they can participate with a clear conscience. If their differences

are relatively minor, or if they can respect our church leaders and

structures without being divisive, we welcome them to stay at Mars

Hill.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 194

02/03/06 11:45:13 AM

Distinctives of

Larger Churches

Larger churches have a different kind of pastor

• The preaching pastor has a long tenure, is funny, and preaches

well.

• The preaching pastor mainly preaches and does not do much

counseling.

• The preaching pastor is not as accessible as a pastor of a small

church.

• The preaching pastor understands how to raise large sums of

money when needed.

• The preaching pastor works well with the media to increase

church exposure.

• The preaching pastor learns from other pastors of large

churches, not from conferences.

Larger churches are led differently

• Larger churches are able to make decisions with the involvement

of fewer people.

• Larger churches are able to shape their direction with the

involvement of fewer people.

• Larger churches have multiple leadership teams instead of one

team.

• Larger churches hire specialists with narrow ministry areas, not

generalists.

195

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 195

02/03/06 11:45:13 AM

196 • Confessions of a Reformission Rev.

• Larger churches have multiple levels of organizational responsibility and multiple centers of organizational leadership and are

not run by the primary leader.

• Larger churches hire more from within the church than do

smaller churches.

• Larger churches hire slowly and fire quickly.

• Larger churches must plan much further ahead because they are

more complicated.

Larger churches use their facilities differently

• Larger churches tend to have longer worship ser vices than

smaller congregations do.

• Larger churches are willing to open their doors as often as is

needed to grow.

• Larger churches depend on small groups in homes, whereas

smaller churches conduct most of their church meetings in the

church building.

Larger churches have higher expectations

• Larger churches have higher expectations for their members’

active participation.

• Larger churches have a higher number of higher-quality ministries and expect a higher level of excellence than do comparable

ministries in smaller churches.

• Larger churches expect to lose people who are not committed to

their mission, while smaller churches work much harder at keeping people from leaving the church.

• Larger churches generally have a superior music ministry.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 196

02/03/06 11:45:14 AM

Larger Church Dinstinctives • 197

Larger churches rely more on their own resources

• Larger churches function independently or in loosely affiliated

networks.

• Local leaders govern larger churches, while smaller churches

rely more on regional or national leadership.

• Larger churches are more likely to plant churches or to have

multiple sites.

• Larger churches innovate new ministries, and smaller churches

copy successful models from other churches.

Larger churches are theologically conservative

and culturally liberal

• Larger churches tend to be more conservative in theology and

more liberal in practice, while smaller churches are often more

liberal in theology (e.g., denial of eternal hell) and conservative

in practice (e.g., liturgy, hymns, vestments).

• Larger churches tend to present clear, authoritative teaching

from Scripture, while theological pluralism tends to thrive in

smaller churches.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 197

02/03/06 11:45:14 AM

Notes

Prelude

1. Cathy Lynn Gossman, “Charting the Unchurched in America,” USA Today, March

7, 2002, www.usatoday.com/life/2002/2002-03-07-no-religion.htm (accessed June

21, 2005); Theron Zahn, “Washington State May Be Losing Its Faith,” KOMO

News, March 17, 2002, www.komotv.com/news/story_m.asp?ID=17365 (accessed

June 21, 2005); David T. Olson, The State of the Church in the Seattle Metro Area

1990 – 2000, CD-ROM (2004), slides 16, 18. Olson’s CD can be purchased from

The American Church, www.theamericanchurch.org/metro.htm.

2. John N. Vaughan, “Learning from America’s Top 100 Fastest-Growing

Churches,” Outreach, July – August 2005, 51 – 56; John N. Vaughan, “Top 50 Most

Influential Churches,” The Church Report, July 2005, www.thechurchreport.

com/content/view/484/32/.

3. George Barna, “Twentysomethings Struggle to Find Their Place in Chris tian

Churches,” The Barna Update, September 24, 2003, The Barna Group, www.barna.

org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdate&BarnaUpdateID=149.

4. Ibid.

5. George Barna, “Church Attendance,” Barna by Topic, 2005, The Barna Group,

www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=Topic&TopicID=10 .

6. John N. Vaughan, America’s Megachurches 2005, CD-ROM version 5.1 (Church

Growth Today, 2005), slide 215. This PowerPoint seminar CD can be purchased

from Church Growth Today, www.churchgrowthtoday.com/Content/ContentCT.

asp?P=19.

7. Barna, “Church Attendance.”

8. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work,

Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic, 2002).

9. William H. Frey, “Generational Pull,” American Demographics 26, no. 4 (May

2004): 18 – 19. William Frey is a demographer at the Brookings Institution and a

research professor at the University of Michigan Population Studies Center. His

website is www.frey-demographer.org. Also see “Seattle Area a Big Draw for College-Educated Singles,” Puget Sound Business Journal, November 3, 2003.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

Chapter Zero: Ten Curious Questions

1. Mark Driscoll, The Radical Reformission: Reaching Out without Selling Out (Grand

Rapids: Zondervan, 2004).

2. The following discussion and the categories of traditional and institutional, contemporary and evangelical, and emerging and missional churches summarizes the

work and ideas of Scott Thomas, who is a friend, an Acts 29 board member, and

the pastor of the Encounter Church in Colorado (www.encounterchurch.com).

3. Lyle Schaller, The Very Large Church (Nashville: Abingdon, 2000), 53.

198

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 198

02/03/06 11:45:14 AM

Notes • 199

4. Ibid. See also Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of Ameri-

can Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 76.

5. Dan Kimball, The Emerging Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003).

6. For an example of this position, see Joel B. Green and Mark D. Baker (whom I

affectionately refer to as Hymenaus and Alexander), Recovering the Scandal of the

Cross: Atonement in New Testament and Contemporary Contexts (Downers Grove,

IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000); as well as Brian D. McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy

(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 45 – 49. For those readers who wish to grow in

their understanding of what Jesus accomplished by dying in our place and rising

from the dead, I recommend John Piper, Counted Righ teous in Christ: Should We

Abandon the Imputation of Christ’s Righ teous ness? (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2002);

Alister E. McGrath, What Was God Doing on the Cross? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan,

1993); Leon Morris, The Atonement: Its Meaning and Significance (Downers Grove,

IL: InterVarsity Press, 1983); John Murray, Redemption Accomplished and Applied

(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1955); John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downers

Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986); and Bruce Demarest, ed., The Cross and Salva-

tion (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1997).

7. A pioneering work for the pro-gay and “Chris tian” position is John Boswell,

Chris tian ity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from

the Beginning of the Chris tian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1980). Another pro-gay and “Chris tian” book of note is Mel White,

Stranger at the Gate: To Be Gay and Chris tian in America (New York: Penguin, 1994),

in which he tells of his secret life as a gay man while acting as a powerful evangelical Chris tian. For a biblical position on homosexuality, a good read is Robert

A. J. Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice (Nashville: Abingdon, 2002), as

well as his website, www.robgagnon.net. Joseph Nicolosi provides clinical insights

on the issue in Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality: A New Clinical Approach

(Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1991). For good preventive insights, see Jason

Nicolosi and Linda Ames Nicolosi, A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality

(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002). Perhaps the saddest example of the

Emergent answer to the question of homosexuality was given by Brian McLaren in

the Time magazine cover story “The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America,”

(February 7, 2005): “Asked at a conference last spring what he thought about gay

marriage, Brian McLaren replied, ‘You know what, the thing that breaks my heart

is that there’s no way I can answer it without hurting someone on either side’ ” (45).

Sadly, by failing to answer, McLaren was unwilling to say what the Bible says.

8. For example, see Brian D. McLaren, The Last Word and the Word after That: A Tale

of Faith, Doubt, and a New Kind of Chris tian ity (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005).

To better understand the biblical doctrine of hell, see Robert A. Peterson, Hell On

Trial: The Case for Eternal Punishment (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R, 1995); Douglas

J. Moo, Hell under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents Eternal Punishment (Grand

Rapids: Zondervan, 2004); David George Moore, The Battle for Hell (Lanham,

MD: Univ. Press of America, 1996); Harry Buis, The Doctrine of Eternal Punishment

(Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1957); and John H. Gerstner, Repent or

Perish: A Biblical Response to the Conservative Attack on Hell (Ligonier, PA: Soli Deo

Gloria, 1990). Or just read the words of Jesus in the gospels, since he spoke about

hell more than anyone.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 199

02/03/06 11:45:14 AM

200 • Confessions of a Reformission Rev.

9. For example, see Gregory A. Boyd, God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the

Open View of God (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000); Clark Pinnock et al., The Openness

of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994); John Sanders, The God Who

Risks: A Theology of Providence (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998); and

Clark Pinnock, Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God’s Openness (Grand Rapids:

Baker Academic, 2001). To get a biblical view of God’s foreknowledge of and rule

over the future, see Bruce A. Ware, God’s Lesser Glory: The Diminished God of Open

Theism (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2000); John Piper, Justin Taylor, and Paul Kjoss

Helseth, eds., Beyond the Bounds: Open Theism and the Undermining of Biblical Chris-

tian ity (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2003); Bruce A. Ware, Their God Is Too Small:

Open Theism and the Undermining of Confidence in God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway,

2003); John M. Frame, No Other God: A Response to Open Theism (Phillipsburg, NJ:

P & R, 2001); Douglas Wilson, ed., Bound Only Once: The Failure of Open Theism

(Moscow, ID: Canon, 2001); Millard J. Erickson, What Does God Know and When

Does He Know It? The Current Controversy over Divine Foreknowledge (Grand Rapids:

Zondervan, 2003); and H. Wayne House, Charts on Open Theism and Orthodoxy

(Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2004).

10. For example, see William J. Webb, Slaves, Women and Homosexuals: Exploring the

Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001).

To get a better perspective on this issue, I recommend John Piper and Wayne

Grudem, eds., Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical

Feminism (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1991).

11. For example, see McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy, 74 – 75. For a biblical position,

see D. A. Carson, The Inclusive-Language Debate: A Plea for Realism (Grand Rapids:

Baker, 1998); and Vern S. Poythress and Wayne A. Grudem, The TNIV and the

Gender-Neutral Bible Controversy (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 2004).

12. For a good understanding of the current confusion over how to read and interpret

Scripture, Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text? (Grand Rapids:

Zondervan, 1998) is helpful, as well as his First Theology: God, Scriptures and

Hermeneutics (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002).

13. Abraham H. Maslow, Motivation and Personality, 3rd ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1987).

14. Perhaps the most popular book espousing the gospel of self-esteem is Joel Osteen,

Your Best Life Now: Seven Steps to Living at Your Full Potential (New York: Warner

Faith, 2004).

15. Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003) has become quite popular among younger and more missionally

minded Chris tians. However, while the book is very strong on the incarnational

aspect of Jesus’ ministry, it altogether ignores his attractional ministries, such as

teaching and performing miracles.

16. John N. Vaughan, America’s Megachurches 2005, CD-ROM version 5.1 (Church

Growth Today, 2005), slides 18, 20, 51; Schaller, The Very Large Church, 17, 28,

43 – 45; George Barna, “Small Churches Struggle to Grow Because of the People

They Attract,” The Barna Update, September 2, 2003, The Barna Group, www.

barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdate&BarnaUpdateID=148 (accessed June

21, 2005).

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 200

02/03/06 11:45:14 AM

Notes • 201

17. Vaughan, America’s Megachurches 2005, slide 51; “About Us,” Church Growth Today:

www.churchgrowthtoday.com/Content/ContentCT.asp?P=19 ( June 21, 2005).

18. In a footnote to his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam writes, “See C. Kirk

Hadaway, Penny Long Marler, and Mark Chaves, ‘What the Polls Don’t Show: A

Closer Look at U.S. Church Attendance,’ American Sociological Review 58 (December 1993): 741 – 52; Mark Chaves and James C. Cavendish, ‘More Evidence on

U.S. Catholic Church Attendance,’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 33

(December 1994): 376 – 81; and ‘Symposium: Surveys of U.S. Church Attendance.’

According to the 1996 General Social Survey, only 2 percent of people who did

not attend church ‘last week’ report that they attended some other type of religious

event or meeting. Thus the standard question does not ‘miss’ a significant number

of people who attend, say, prayer meetings instead of church ser vices” (Putnam,

Bowling Alone, 453n. 29). Also see David T. Olson, Ten Fascinating Facts about the

American Church, CD-ROM (2004), slide 3, The American Church: www.TheAmericanChurch.org.

19. Barna, “Small Churches Struggle.”

20. Schaller, The Very Large Church, 42.

21. Barna, “Small Churches Struggle.”

22. John N. Vaughan, Megachurches and America’s Cities: How Churches Grow (Bolivar,

MS: Church Growth Today, 2003), 19. Lyle Schaller defines a megachurch as any

church with a weekly attendance of adults and children that is at least 1,801 people

( The Very Large Church, 28).

23. Vaughan, Megachurches and America’s Cities, 24. For those wanting to learn more

about Spurgeon, see Lewis A. Drummond, Spurgeon: Prince of Preachers (Grand

Rapids: Kregel, 1992); Iain H. Murray, The Forgotten Spurgeon (Carlisle, PN:

Banner of Truth, 1966); Iain H. Murray, Spurgeon V Hyper-Calvinism: The Battle

for Gospel Preaching (Carlisle, PN: Banner of Truth, 1995); Eric Hayden, The

Unforgettable Spurgeon (Greenville, SC: Emerald House Group, 1997); and Arnold

Dallimore, Spurgeon: A New Biography (Carlisle, PN: Banner of Truth, 1995).

24. Vaughan, Megachurches and America’s Cities, 24.

25. Elmer Towns, The Ten Largest Sunday Schools (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1969).

26. Vaughan, America’s Megachurches 2005 (version 5.2), slide 38.

27. Schaller, The Very Large Church, 16 – 17.

28. Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come (Peabody, MA:

Hendrickson, 2003).

29. Thomas F. Mathews, The Early Churches of Constantinople: Architecture and Liturgy

(University Park, PN: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971); Vaughan,

Megachurches and America’s Cities, 24; and John N. Vaughan, The Large Church: A

Twentieth-Century Expression of the First-Century Church (Grand Rapids: Baker,

1985), 33 – 43.

30. Vaughan, America’s Megachurches 2005, slides 54 – 55.

31. “Yoido Full Gospel Church Story,” Full Gospel Television, http://english.fgtv.

com/yfgc.pdf (accessed June 21, 2005).

32. Craig Keener, Larry Osborne, and Mark Driscoll, “An Army of Ones,” Leadership

26, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 38 – 43.

33. Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organiza-

tion (New York: Currency, 1994), 341 – 45.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 201

02/03/06 11:45:15 AM

202 • Confessions of a Reformission Rev.

34. To better understand these concepts, see Stephen R. Covey et al., First Things

First: To Live, to Love, to Learn, to Leave a Legacy (New York: Simon and Schuster,

1994).

35. I took the concept of shooting our dogs from a conversation I had with a friend

named Jon Phelps, who is the president of DC – 3 Entertainment and the founder

of Full Sail College.

Chapter One: Jesus, Our Offering Was $137

and I Want to Use It to Buy Bullets

1. I took this punch line from a stand-up comedian I heard while flipping through

the channels one night; the comedian’s name remains unknown to me.

2. The concept of organizational infancy was taken from Michael E. Gerber, The E-

Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do about It, 2nd

ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2001).

3. This chart is adapted from Frost and Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come, with

two major changes. First, they placed missiology above ecclesiology in the order of

priority, which diminishes the importance of biblical church leadership to define

and lead the mission. Second, I added the fourth category of ministry so that each

individual Chris tian would be aware that their ministry ser vice is their way of

serving Jesus under their church leaders as part of the mission of a local church.

4. For further study on principles for organizing church leadership, see Gene A.

Getz, Elders and Leaders: God’s Plan for Leading the Church (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2003); on the biblical teaching on pastors-elders, see Alexander Strauch,

Biblical Eldership: An Urgent Call to Restore Biblical Church Leadership (Littleton,

CO: Lewis and Roth, 1995); on church priorities, see Mark Dever, Nine Marks

of a Healthy Church (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004); for practical principles on

cultivating an effective leadership team, see Larry W. Osborne, The Unity Factor:

Developing a Healthy Church Leadership Team, 3rd ed. (Vista, CA: Owl’s Nest, 2001);

and for insights on being a godly pastor, see Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor

(Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1979), and Eugene H. Peterson, The Contemplative

Pastor: Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989).

Chapter Two: Jesus, If Anyone Else Calls My House,

I May Be Seeing You Real Soon

1. Vanessa Ho, “Just 33 Percent in State Attend Church, Yet Some Faiths Are

Thriving,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, September 19, 2002, http://seattlepi.nwsource.

com/local/87669_religion19.shtml?searchpagefrom=1&searchdiff=1014; Patricia O’Connell Killen, Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest: The None

Zone (Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2004); “Kidless in Seattle,” Seattle Times, 2000,

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/art/census2000/charts/censuschildrenchart08.

pdf; “Where the Children Live,” Seattle Times, 2000, http://seattletimes.nwsource.

com/art/census2000/maps/kidsregionalmap08.pdf; and “Children in Seattle,”

Seattle Times, 2000, http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/art/census2000/charts/

childrenpopulation08.pdf.

2. Timothy Egan, “Vibrant Cities Find One Thing Missing: Children,” New York

Times, March 24, 2005, A1. (Also available at www.nytimes.com/2005/03/24/

national/24childless.html.)

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 202

02/03/06 11:45:15 AM

Notes • 203

3. I gained a lot from R. Bruce Bickel, Light and Heat: A Puritan View of the Pulpit

(Ligonier, PA: Soli Deo Gloria, 1999); William Perkins, The Art of Prophesy-

ing (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1996); D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching

and Preachers (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1971); and Martin Luther, Lectures on

Galatians (St. Louis: Concordia, 1963), which is different from his commentary on

Galatians and greatly helped to clarify that the gospel is about who you love and

not just about what you do.

Chapter Four: Jesus, Could You Please Rapture the

Charismaniac Lady Who Brings Her Tambourine to Church?

1. Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

(New York: Back Bay, 2002), 179.

2. Ibid., 172 – 73.

3. Ibid., 180.

4. Ibid., 180 – 81.

5. The concept of organizational adolescence is taken from Gerber, The E-Myth

Revisited.

6. Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Chris tian Spirituality

(Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2003); Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What

(Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2004); Donald Miller, Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen

Maintenance (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2000).

7. Chris Seay, The Gospel According to Tony Soprano: An Unauthorized Look Into the

Soul of TV’s Top Mob Boss and His Family (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2002);

Chris Seay, Faith of My Fathers: Conversations with Three Generations of Pastors about

Church, Ministry, and Culture (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005); and Chris Seay

and Chad Karger, To Become One: After “I Do,” The Real Journey Begins (Lake Mary,

FL: Relevant, 2004).

8. Recordings of the David Crowder Band include All I Can Say, compact disc (Independent: July 1, 1998); Can You Hear Us? compact disc (Sparrow/Emd: February

26, 2002); Illuminate, compact disc (Sparrow/Emd: September 16, 2003); The Lime

CD, compact disc (Sparrow/Emd: March 23, 2004); Sunsets and Sushi, compact disc

(Sparrow/Emd: February 15, 2005).

9. Dan Kimball, The Emerging Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003); Dan Kimball, Emerging Worship: Creating Worship Gatherings for New Generations (Grand

Rapids: Zondervan, 2004).

10. In an effort to understand postmodernism, I started by studying René Descartes

and his view of knowledge and truth. I then studied a great deal on Blaise Pascal, a

contemporary of Descartes who disagreed with his epistemology and foresaw the

implications of Descartes’ errors, which led to rationalism, deism, and eventually

atheism. A simple introduction to Pascal is Thomas V. Morris, Making Sense of It

All: Pascal and the Meaning of Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992); and helpful in

understanding Pascal’s alternative to Descartes, if you can overlook the author’s

Catholic biases at the end of the book, is Peter Kreeft, Chris tian ity for Modern

Pagans: Pascal’s Pensées (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993). To better understand some of the foundational thinkers of postmodernity, I read up on Frederick

Nietszche and Martin Heidegger, including James L. Perotti, Heidegger on the

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 203

02/03/06 11:45:15 AM

204 • Confessions of a Reformission Rev.

Divine: The Thinker, the Poet, and God (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1974),

in an effort to figure out Heidegger’s complex view of God. I also looked at the

history of modern philosophy by reading Frederick C. Copleston, A History of

Philosophy, vol. 4 (New York: Image, 1994); and Gordon Michalson, Lessing’s ‘Ugly

Ditch’: A Study of Theology and History (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State

University Press, 1985). I tried to wade through some of the postmodern thinkers, especially the more spiritually focused books: John D. Caputo and Michael

J. Scanlon, eds., God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana

University Press, 1999); Jacques Derrida and John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a

Nutshell: A Converstaion with Jacques Derrida (Bronx: Fordham University Press,

1997); and Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1995). I read some overviews of postmodernism, including Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents (New York: New York University Press,

1997); Huston Smith, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind (Wheaton, IL: Quest, 1989);

Anthony C. Thiselton, Interpreting God and the Postmodern Self: On Meaning,

Manipulation and Promise (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995); Paul Lakeland,

Postmodernity: Chris tian Identity in a Fragmented Age (Minneapolis: Augsburg

Fortress, 1997); and Craig Kennet Miller, Postmoderns: The Beliefs, Hopes, and Fears

of Young Americans Born 1965 – 1981 (Nashville: Discipleship Resources, 1996).

I then investigated the implications of postmodernism: on truth, Walter Truett

Anderson, ed., The Truth about the Truth (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam,

1995); on understanding, Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975); on leadership, Margaret J. Wheatley,

Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World (San Francisco:

Berret-Koehler, 1999); on morality and ethics, Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and

Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1990); and on the social sciences, David R. Dickens and Andrea Fontana, eds.,

Postmodernism and Social Inquiry (New York: Guilford, 1994). I then looked at

how the transition from modernism to postmodernism might be part of a larger

historical shift: William Strauss and Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning: An American

Prophecy (New York: Broadway, 1997). And I examined the role of Chris tian ity

in the postmodern world: Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom? How the Church

Is to Behave If Freedom, Justice, and a Chris tian Nation Are Bad Ideas (Nashville:

Abingdon, 1991); Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens:

Life in the Chris tian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon, 1989); and Rodney Clapp, A

Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Chris tian Society (Downers Grove,

IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996). I looked at some of the early critiques of modern

faith: J. Gresham Machen, Chris tian ity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,

1923); and I looked at the works of Francis A. Schaeffer, particularly The Church at

the End of the Twentieth Century (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1970). I

also read evangelical Chris tian explanations of postmodernism: Stanley J. Grenz,

A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996); and Gene Edward

Veith Jr., Postmodern Times: A Chris tian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture

(Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994). I also investigated some Chris tian critiques of

postmodernism, such as D. A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Chris tian ity Confronts

Pluralism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996); Dennis McCallum, ed., The Death of

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 204

02/03/06 11:45:16 AM

Notes • 205

Truth: Responding to Multiculturalism, the Rejection of Reason and the New Postmodern

Diversity (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1996); and Alister McGrath, A Passion for

Truth: The Intellectual Coherence of Evangelicalism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity

Press, 1996). I then examined the emerging postmodern critique of foundational

theology: Nancey Murphy, Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism: How Modern

and Postmodern Philosophy Set the Theological Agenda (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press

International, 1996). And I examined the attempt at post-foundational theology:

George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal

Age (Philadelphia: Westminster/John Knox, 1984); and Timothy R. Phillips and

Dennis L. Okholm, eds., The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals and Postliberals in

Conversation (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996). I also looked at the

trend in Great Britain of Chris tians embracing postmodernity: Dave Tomlinson,

The Post-Evangelical (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003); and Graham Cray, Post-

Evangelical Debate (London: SPCK, 2000). Lastly, I examined a missional approach

to reaching postmodern people: Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989). All of this to simply say that in the mid and late

1990s, this is how a lot of my free time was spent, and in the end, after muttering

1 Co rin thi ans 1:20 – 21 — “Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where

is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him,

God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who

believe.” — I simply moved on to preach the bloody death and triumphant victory

of Jesus. For my fellow young Chris tian pastors prone to jump on faddish bandwagons like I did, I would simply urge you to at least do your homework and see

if you can find anyone wiser than Jesus to found your life and ministry on. If not,

just stick with him.

11. Max Picard, The Flight from God (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1989).

12. Doug Pagitt, Preaching Re-Imagined: The Role of the Sermon in Communities of Faith

(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005); Doug Pagitt, Reimagining Spiritual Formation: A

Week in the Life of an Experimental Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003).

13. Books by Brian McLaren include: Finding Faith: A Self-Discovery Guide for Your

Spiritual Quest (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1999); A New Kind of Chris tian: A Tale

of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001); More Ready

Than You Realize: Evangelism as Dance in the Postmodern Matrix (Grand Rapids:

Zondervan, 2002); The Story We Find Ourselves In: Further Adventures of a New Kind

of Chris tian (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003); The Church on the Other Side: Doing

Ministry in the Postmodern Matrix (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003); and A Gener-

ous Orthodoxy and The Last Word and the Word after That (cited earlier). Books he

has coauthored include: Brian D. McLaren and Tony Campolo, Adventures in Miss-

ing the Point: How the Culture-Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel (Grand Rapids:

Zondervan, 2003); and Leonard Sweet, Brian D. McLaren, and Jerry Haselmayer,

A is for Abductive: The Language of the Emerging Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan,

2003).

14. See www.emergentvillage.com for more information.

15. Rick Warren, The Purpose-Driven Church: Growth without Compromising Your Mes-

sage and Mission (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995).

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 205

02/03/06 11:45:16 AM

206 • Confessions of a Reformission Rev.

16. See www.gocn.org; Darrell L. Guder, The Continuing Conversion of the Church

(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000); Darrell L. Guder, ed., Missional Church: A Vision

for the Sending of the Church in North America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998);

George R. Hunsberger and Craig Van Gelder, eds., The Church between Gospel and

Culture: The Emerging Mission in North America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996).

17. Alan J. Roxburgh, The Missionary Congregation, Leadership, and Liminality

(Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1997); Alan J. Roxburgh, “Missional

Leadership: Equipping God’s People for Mission,” in Missional Church, ed. Darrell

L. Guder (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 183 – 220.

18. For further study on this subject, see James R. Beck and Craig L. Blomberg, eds.,

Two Views on Women in Ministry (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001). My position is

essentially the one proposed by Blomberg in the appendix.

19. To more thoroughly think through this and other methods for improving stewardship in your church, see George Barna, How to Increase Giving at Your Church: A

Practical Guide to the Sensitive Task of Raising Money for Your Church or Ministry

(Ventura, CA: Regal Books 1997).

Chapter Five: Jesus, Why Am I Getting Fatter and Meaner?

1. Helpful books on the demonic include: as a good introduction to spiritual warfare,

Charles Spurgeon, Spiritual Warfare in a Believer’s Life, ed. Robert Hall (Seattle:

YWAM, 1993); for practical insights, C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New

York: Macmillan, 1961); for pastoral help, Neil T. Anderson, The Bondage Breaker,

2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2000); on demonic temptation to sin,

Thomas Brooks, Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices (Carlisle, PA: Banner

of Truth, 1984); on demonization, C. Fred Dickason, Demon Possession and the

Chris tian (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1987); for an overview of biblical texts on the

issue, Edward F. Murphy, The Handbook for Spiritual Warfare (Nashville: Thomas

Nelson, 2003); and for an examination of Paul’s dealings with Satan and demons,

Clinton E. Arnold, Power and Magic: The Concept of Power in Ephesians (Eugene,

OR: Wipf and Stock, 2001), and Clinton E. Arnold, Powers of Darkness: Principali-

ties and Powers in Paul’s Letters (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992).

Chapter Six: Jesus, Today We Voted to Take a Jackhammer

to Your Big Church

1. The concept of organizational comfort is adapted from Gerber, The E-Myth

Revisited.

2. Acts 29 is the church-planting network of which I am president. For more information, visit www.Acts29Network.org.

3. Vaughan, Megachurches and America’s Cities, 99.

4. See Schaller, The Very Large Church; Vaughan, Megachurches and America’s Cities;

Carl F. George, How to Break Growth Barriers: Capturing Overlooked Opportuni-

ties for Church Growth (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993); Gary L. McIntosh, One Size

Doesn’t Fit All: Bringing Out the Best in Any Size Church (Grand Rapids: Baker,

1999); Lyle E. Schaller, The Multiple Staff and the Larger Church (Nashville: Abingdon, 1980); Barna, “Small Churches Struggle”; and Church Growth Today, www.

churchgrowthtoday.com, for many resources. For those who are interested, some

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 206

02/03/06 11:45:16 AM

Notes • 207

of the more pertinent differences between smaller and larger churches are included

in appendix 2.

5. Ibid.

6. Janet I. Tu, “Pastor Mark Packs ’Em In,” Pacific Northwest, November 30, 2003,

16 – 40. (Also available at http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/pacificnw/2003/1130/

cover.html.)

7. Shannon O’Leary, “The Power List: 25 Most Influential People,” Seattle, November 2004, 66 – 67.

8. “Children in Seattle,” Seattle Times; Egan, “Vibrant Cities Find One Thing Missing: Children.”

9. See www.Acts29Network.org.

10. Go to www.reformission.com for free audio files of this conference.

11. For free audio files, go to www.MarsHillChurch.org.

Chapter Seven: Jesus, We’re Loading Our Squirt Guns

to Charge Hell Again

1. The concept of organizational maturity is taken from Gerber, The E-Myth

Revisited.

2. Vaughan, America’s Megachurches 2005, slide 135.

3. For further study, Strauch’s Biblical Eldership (cited earlier) is very helpful.

4. If you are not familiar with Dr. Piper, perhaps the best place to start is his most

popular book, Desiring God: Meditations of a Chris tian Hedonist (Portland, OR:

Multnomah, 1996). You can also visit his website for numerous free theological

resources and some great preaching, www.desiringgod.org.

5. Barna, “Twentysomethings Struggle to Find Their Place.”

6. Ho, “Just 33 Percent in State Attend Church”; O’Connell Killen, Religion and Pub-

lic Life in the Pacific Northwest; Gossman, “Charting the Unchurched in America”;

Zahn, “Washington State May Be Losing Its Faith”; Olson, The State of the Church

in the Seattle Metro Area, slides 16, 18.

7. Olson, The State of the Church in the Seattle Metro Area, slides 36 – 37.

Apendix One: The Junk Drawer

1. See www.Acts29Network.org.

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 207

02/03/06 11:45:16 AM

About the Leadership Network

Innovation Series

Since 1984, Leadership Network has fostered church innovation and

growth by diligently pursuing its far-reaching mission statement: To

identify high-capacity Christian leaders, to connect them with other

leaders, and to help them multiply their impact.

While specific techniques may vary as the church faces new opportunities and challenges, Leadership Network consistently focuses on

bringing together entrepreneurial leaders who are pursuing similar

ministry initiatives. The resulting peer-to-peer interaction, dialogue,

and collaboration — often across denominational lines — helps these

leaders better refine their individual strategies and accelerate their

own innovations.

To further enhance this process, Leadership Network develops

and distributes highly targeted ministry tools and resources, including books, DVDs and videotapes, special reports, e-publications, and

free downloads.

Launched in 2006, the Leadership Network Innovation Series

presents case studies and insights from leading practitioners and

pioneering churches that are successfully navigating the ever-changing streams of spiritual renewal in modern society. Each book offers

real stories, about real leaders, in real churches, doing real ministry.

Readers gain honest and thorough analyses, transferable principles,

and clear guidance on how to put proven ideas to work in their individual settings.

With the assistance of Leadership Network — and the Leadership

Network Innovation Series — today’s Christian leaders are energized,

equipped, inspired, and enabled to multiply their own dynamic kingdom-building initiatives. And the pace of innovative ministry is growing as never before.

For additional information on the mission or activities of

Leadership Network, please contact:

800-765-5323 • www.leadnet.org • client.care@leadnet.org

0310270162_confess_rev.indd 208

02/03/06 11:45:17 AM

About the Publisher

Founded in 1931, Grand Rapids, Michigan-based Zondervan, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, is the leading international Christian

communications company, producing best-selling Bibles, books, new

media products, a growing line of gift products and award-winning

children’s products. The world’s largest Bible publisher, Zondervan

(www.zondervan.com) holds exclusive publishing rights to the New

International Version of the Bible and has distributed more than 150

million copies worldwide. It is also one of the top Christian publishers in the world, selling its award-winning books through Christian

retailers, general market bookstores, mass merchandisers, specialty

retailers, and the Internet. Zondervan has received a total of 68 Gold

Medallion awards for its books, more than any other publisher.

Share Your Thoughts

With the Author: Your comments will be forwarded to

the author when you send them to zauthor@zondervan.com.

With Zondervan: Submit your review of this book

by writing to zreview@zondervan.com.

Free Online Resources at

www.zondervan.com/hello

Zondervan AuthorTracker: Be notifi ed whenever your

favorite authors publish new books, go on tour, or post

an update about what’s happening in their lives.

Daily Bible Verses and Devotions: Enrich your life

with daily Bible verses or devotions that help you start

every morning focused on God.

Free Email Publications: Sign up for newsle ers on

fi ction, Christian living, church ministry, parenting, and

more.

Zondervan Bible Search: Find and compare

Bible passages in a variety of translations at

www.zondervanbiblesearch.com.

Other Benefi ts: Register yourself to receive online

benefi ts like coupons and special off ers, or to participate

in research.

031027236x_axiom.ndd.indd 224

6/12/08 12:26:24 PM

Document Outline

- Title Page

- Copyright Page

- Contents

- Acknowledgments

- Prelude

- Chapter 0. Ten Curious Questions

- Chapter 1. Jesus, Our Offering Was $137 and I Want to Use It to Buy Bullets

- Chapter 2. Jesus, If Anyone Else Calls My House, I May Be Seeing You Real Soon

- Chapter 3. Jesus, Satan Showed Up and I Can�t Find My Cup

- Chapter 4. Jesus, Could You Please Rapture the Charismaniac Lady Who Brings Her Tambourine to Church?

- Chapter 5. Jesus, Why Am I Getting Fatter and Meaner?

- Chapter 6. Jesus, Today We Voted to Take a Jackhammer to Your Big Church

- Chapter 7. Jesus, We�re Loading Our Squirt Guns to Charge Hell Again

- Appendix 1 � The Junk Drawer: Answers to Common Questions

- Appendix 2 � Distinctives of Larger Churches

- Notes

- About the Publisher

- Share Your Thoughts

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 7

Prelude 9

0. Ten Curious Questions

1. Jesus, Our Offering Was $137 and I Want to Use It to Buy Bullets

2. Jesus, If Anyone Else Calls My House,

3. Jesus, Satan Showed Up and I Can’t Find My Cup

4. Jesus, Could You Please Rapture the Charismaniac Lady

5. Jesus, Why Am I Getting Fatter and Meaner?

6. Jesus, Today We Voted to Take a Jackhammer to Your Big Church

7. Jesus, We’re Loading Our Squirt Guns to Charge Hell Again

Appendix 1 — The Junk Drawer: Answers to Common Questions

Appendix 2 — Distinctives of Larger Churches

Notes 198

About the Publisher

Share Your Thoughts

Acknowledgments

.4

;9

.17 S

.34

.3

.11

.16

s5 a

3.

6.

10.

1.

2.

4.

5.

12.

13.

15.

16.

17.

22.

28.

30.

33.

35.

2. T

4. F

2. I

7.

11.

14.

15. R

18.

19.