Tony Wheeler dot Net

Whew!  Am I glad that is over.  The election, that is.  Since sometime in 2006, we have been bombarded with political junk and most of us have been sick of it since then.  So now what?  What does the future of this great nation hold?  I’m not entirely certain, but I do know that God still reigns, no matter who holds the highest office in the land. 

In the circles in which I travel, there has been much talk about our (”our” being Christians, Ministers, etc) response to Barack Obama becoming the President-elect.  Most everyone agrees that following BIblical mandates regarding submitting to authority and also praying diligently for our soon-to-be president are good things. I’m with them.  (The conspiracy theory nut in me has some other ideas, but luckily my wife keeps me grounded.)  With that being said, I’d like to talk a bit about why I think people overwhelmingly, especially inside of Christian circles, voted for Obama and what I think that means. 

It is no secret that Obama is for social justice.  A look at his policies including health care reform, tax policies, and even closing the Guantanamo Bay Naval installment speak very loudly to the fact that he is very interested in social reform.  In the Christian world, we’ve become enamored with social justice, which I think is funny because isn’t that what we’re supposed to be about anyway? So here is a guy who says he is going to do a lot of stuff for the people that we want to help.  Cool!  He is also not the president that almost all of us voted for in the last two elections, but since he is so unpopular we no longer want to associate with him.  The only problem is that Obama’s social policies are not social justice in Biblical terms, they are social policies in governmental terms.  I’m all for government.  Small government that protects freedom and liberty among it’s people.  

The problem I see is that we’ve become enamored with the idea of social justice but don’t actually want to do the work of social justice.  We’d love for poor people to have more money.  We’d love to pay less taxes (which under Obama (or McCain), you probably won’t…The Fair Tax would be the way to go).  We’d love for everyone to have equal access to healthcare and education.  But somewhere along the line we’ve bought into the lie that these things are better left to the government.  Ask the good people in Africa how that is working for them.  Ask the people in Haiti how that is working for them.  Ask the people in Honduras how that is working for them. If it works so well, why do we use a lot of resources sending missionaries equipped with mobile clinics to heal these people?  Why isn’t their government taking care of them? 

The bottom line is that we need to be THE CHURCH.  We need to stop building church buildings and programs and put our money where our mouth is.  We need to be Gospel Incarnate and actually live out the things that we preach about.  We need to respond when Jesus tells us that we are to care for the sick, widows, and orphans.  We need to be sensitive to the needs around us and take action on them when we are able.  If we aren’t able, I guarantee that we know someone who is able.  

I might be preaching to the choir, but if that is so, then why do we still have Welfare, Food Stamps, and homeless people sleeping in the woods?  

Just something to think about.

The internet is a funny place.  Many moons ago, before Al Gore invented the internet, people used really neat technology to call other computers or servers.  Basically these computers would talk to each other and the owners could transmit 1s and 0s to each other in nifty green screen or if you were lucky orange screen.  They would also dial into a central computer and use something called BBS.  BBS was the early form of online community.

Now, I’m not that geeky and most of what I know about these old technologies I’ve learned from Hollywood or books such as “The Computer that Wore Sneakers”.  My foray into the wonderful world of the information superhighway came sometime in the mid-Nineties when I would use my grandparent’s home computer to dial up (probably a 9600 or 14.4 modem I don’t remember) to America Online to research and occasionally chat.  Surely you remember those days?  During college I utilized AOL Instant Messenger exclusively and services like Yahoo and MSN were loathed by yours truly.  I used to chat a ton and always had IM active when I was online.  Then I would meet one person who used Yahoo or one person who used MSN Messenger.  Then cool services like Trillian and now the web based Meebo came out where you could have one central location to manage all of your contacts.  Today, Social Networking, which is pretty much what the early BBS and IM were, has exploded into tons of networks and services.

So what?  I was thinking today as I was reading a new blog that I stumbled upon by a guy named Paul Watson about the social nature of the internet. It seems that we’ve come full circle in terms of what we use the internet for.  Sure we can get the latest news, stock quotes, pay bills, buy stuff that we don’t even need, and conduct endless amounts of research.  But by and large the internet is still used for networking of the social and professional variety. Blogs, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Plurk, Forums, LinkedIn, and a whole bunch of other places are simply ways to connect with other people.

Paul’s blog has a ton of interesting info about reaching the online generation.  If you are a staff member or volunteer at a church, it is worth your time to take a minute to check his blog out.

I’ll be talking more about the online community and what I’ve done and what I would like to do to have a great impact more as the days go by.  The real eye opener behind all of this is that people are searching out connections and community in any way that they can get it.  What can we do to help fill this real need in people’s lives?

If you’ve been around the blogosphere lately you’ve probably seen several bloggers hashing out the ideas of discipleship/small groups/organic church vs. ‘traditional’ church.  I’ve had some opportunity to read some of the stuff that these guys are writing and also had some great conversations with some of them.

Perry Noble wrote a post that basically outlined the things that he is struggling with in terms of discipleship.  He mentioned a person wrote to others wondering what their churches were doing to make discipleship.  The caveat was that this could not be on Sunday mornings.  Being a pastor, Perry obviously didn’t agree with that point.  My thought is that discipleship must happen during gatherings such as Sunday worship.  Many churches have Bible teaching times outside of the worship setting as well.  I’ve seen this done tremendously well in a church plant I was on staff at in the Minneapolis area.  I was always impressed that we could gather 50 plus people for an hour each week and they engaged and implemented what we taught.  Amazing!  Should discipleship extend beyond Sunday mornings?  Certainly, but to say that it cannot and does not happen is simply insane.

Perry defined discipleship as teaching someone to walk with Jesus, picking them up when they fall down and teaching them to feed themselves.  Pretty straightforward definition if you ask me.  Perry did mention that it is difficult to make disciples without first having converts…not sure I agree totally there, but could be a matter of semantics and when the point of conversion actually happens.

Anyway..thoughts? Comments? Smart remarks?

Check out these guys for some more reading in this vein.

Chris Elrod

Brian Jones — He has a great series of posts on the idea of small groups….Loved it. Thanks, Brian.

I’ve discussed the Organic/SImple/House church model here at some length.  I’m obviously a fan.  I’ve read a lot from various sources over the years about how these types of churches play out and what some of these guys have to say about mainline churches.

The number one thing that discourages me about being identified with/being a part of a movement of Organic/SImple/House churches is that a number of folks in that camp seem to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  They are under the impression that their meeting in their smaller groups is all that there is to it. While I understand some of their reasoning, I really don’t understand it.  Cell Churches, which are basically house churches that also meet on Sunday for celebratory worship, have thrived in various parts of the world for years.  Christ the King Community Church in Washington State has done an outstanding job of centering their mission and vision around small groups, but also convening together in larger gatherings.  They have done this quite well across the United States of America and also globally as well.  This is just one example, but there are many more.  An interesting facet of Christ the King’s ministry is that the have geographic worship centers.  This seems like a natural outflow of the motivation behind the smaller home church gatherings.  I’m pondering the idea of meeting on a monthly or quarterly basis as a collective body to worship, fellowship and reach out.  I don’t think it has to be either/or, but a both/and. Or in some cases neither.  I might only get to be in an LTG with someone before they have to go home, but they are taking with them some resources to help them start churches once they get there!

Organic/House/Simple Church folks…stop being pissed off at the mainline churches around you.  Redeem what you think is wrong with them, use it to the benefit of the people in your movement and you may be surprised at the outcome.  It isn’t an us and them battle, we’re all in this together.  Just a side note: If you’ve got one house church going and it never grows and/or reproduces, you’re not healthy.  They have a name for groups like that, they are called cults.  God’s vision for your church is much larger than your living room. Expand your horizons.  Meet some more people.  Make some disciples, that is what you’re supposed to be doing anyway!

As a student of Church Planting over the past decade or more, I’ve seen a lot of fads come and go.  Systems that work well for one church in one location but fail miserably in another.  I’ve seen God’s hand divinely placed on some churches while others struggle and eventually close.  One thing that I can say with certainty is that there is no one right way to plant a church.  What works for one may not work for another.  What one pastor can pull off, another will fall flat on his face with.  In the following, I’m NOT bashing anyone, just sharing where my heart is at.

A couple of observations:

• Many times church planters read a book or attend a boot camp and return to their hometown or the place that they have lived for a number of years.  I think that this sometimes causes a loss of the missional focus of the gospel unless there is a strong DNA already there.
• The picture of what it looks like to plant a church in 2008 in the United States is not easily reproduced by everyone with a calling to plant a church.  Elaborate sound systems, projectors, state of the art facilities…they all cost money.  Not everybody has access to a ton of cash.  Not everybody should plant this kind of church, anyway.
• The core of the the Great Commission is not planting new churches, but making disciples.  We have gotten caught up in a wave of planting churches because it is the cool thing to do and not really gotten good at making disciples.  We have the idea that if we have a great sermon on Sunday and having small groups throughout the week automatically makes disciples.  I’ve read the Bible (okay, I’ll admit that I did skim over some of it…I’m sure that it is important who begot whom, but it is DRY!) and I haven’t found this formula anywhere.  Jesus wasn’t interested in teaching the multitudes for a long time, he was interested in forming a band of 12 and then about 70 into dangerous Kingdom agents. Why is this not our strategy?

Being different for the sake of being different is dumb.  Being different for the sake of the Gospel is not.  I’ve been greatly influenced by a number of different speakers and authors, but in the past couple months I’ve been devouring everything that I can get may hands on regarding Simple Church or Organic Church.  I’ve been greatly blessed by Neil Cole, who wrote Organic Church and a host of other stuff that most people haven’t even heard of.  I heard Neil at the Exponential Conference back in April.  He explained a bit about how discipleship is a lost art and that we are on a search and rescue mission.  He explained about how Awakening Chapels, the organic church planting movement that he founded, does discipleship.  Life Transformation Groups (known by many other names) are one of the primary vehicles that they have used in disciple making.

LTGs are groups of 2-3 people of the same sex who meet for one hour each week for Bible reading, accountability and prayer.  The Bible reading is 30 chapters a week.  Seems like a lot, but Neil explained that the goal isn’t simply to finish the reading, rather the goal is to not finish the reading.  If the reading isn’t finished by one person, then the next week the same 30 chapters are to be read.  This continues until everyone finishes the reading. There are a series of accountability questions that are asked and each person should answer truthfully.  Finally, each person selects a couple of people in their lives to pray for.  When God moves into the lives of those people that we have been praying for, new LTG groups are formed.  The possibility for exponential growth is literally limitless.

Simple enough?  You bet.  Can anyone do it? Indeed.  Can it be transferred to other cultures, time periods in history and survive trends in church planting?  I think so.

So, LTGs are the simplest form of church that I have been able to find.  The Bible promises us that where two or more are gathered in the name of Jesus, that he is there also.

Is that it?  Is that where we want to stop? NOT A CHANCE!

Stay tuned for Part III — The Simple Way Church.

I’ve been intentionally quiet on the Church Planting/Spiritual Community building that we have been called to here in the great nation of Florida.  I’ve been doing a lot of reading, praying, listening and conversing.  Our journey to Florida is one that God has had in the works for years and it has been amazing to watch His hand at work in this whole thing.  From the night in 1998 when I went running (yes, I used to run once in awhile!) down on 192 when I was in Orlando for vacation with my entire family and I felt some strange urging that I needed to live here, to the amazing time in 2001 when I spent 6 months on an internship with Disney and met some lifelong friends and some not-so-lifelong friends, to 2003 when I had an unshakable urge to move to Orlando again (little did I know that God had some serious plans for that season as well including preparing my wife and I for each other) and then about 2 years ago God started stirring in us that we were going to be church planters one day in a land far far away.  That land turned out to be Orlando.  Hindsight is a beautiful thing…The movements in our lives over the past few years have been outstanding.  I’m thankful for where we have been and the people along the way and I’m even more thankful for where we are at right now.

I’m gearing up to say:  I’m going to do a series (okay, well it might be one) of posts talking about some of the things that I have learned and heard over the past few months.  It is all rather exciting, to us at least, and it is a huge God movement in us and around us.

Stay tuned!

Having just spent the better part of last week around 2800 people who aim to return to their home turf and plant churches, I have a lot of stuff swimming around in my head that I’m dealing with.  Prior to last week, I’ve kind of been quiet.  I’d not listened to too many podcasts, read too many Christian type books, surfed many blogs or really thought about what God sent us here to do.  I think that was good for my soul.

Having met and spent some time with some people who are really kicking some serious tail, I’ve got a fire in my belly.  I’m not ready to lay it all out here just yet, but hold on to your britches.  I’m really not a hyped up kind of guy.  There are really few things that make me get really excited — the kind of excited where you jump up and down and get all silly.  God’s been planting seeds in me for a couple of years…those seeds are about to sprout and that makes me excited.
So, all that said, I was doing a little blog reading today and my blogging friend, Ben Arment, had a great post about the difference between a church planter’s first and second church plant.  Now I know that I have never been a lead guy in a church plant, but I’ve done various things at various levels in several plants over the years, so I can feel where Ben is coming from.  The huge thing that Ben talked about was a shift in priorities.  I especially think that in the coming years, the shift from any one ‘church’ or denomination or network to the Church of Jesus Christ will be HUGE.  With declining numbers of people in pews, the economy tightening people’s budgets, and disinterest in organized religion, we are going to have to band together.  Things will have to change.  I’m not saying that God won’t still build his kingdom — that really is ultimately his job, he just invites us along for the ride– but we are commanded to go into all the earth and make disciples, so we should probably be doing that. You should head on over to Ben’s blog and check out what he has to say.  He is a great blogger, marketer and Starbucks fanatic.  I think he and Scott Hodge have kept Starbucks afloat while Howard was away.

(You know, it is funny, now that I have to drive at least 10 miles to get to a Starbucks, I want it daily.  I could drink an Venti-sugar-free-hazlenut-skinny-iced-latte pretty much any time of the day.  I’d much rather have something from a local joint, but alas House Blend is like 25 miles away.  Love you guys, but can’t make that trek for a latte! Wow, I’ll end the parenthetical sidebar now.)