As I said a few posts ago, I will be talking about the idea
of “Movement” over the next few weeks. I’m speaking about this topic at our
CONNECT conference in Germany.
There’s lots of conversation about movement these days. Most
of it has to do with creating “a Movement.” As I’ve heard people say this kind
of thing, I have to admit, I’ve been a bit uneasy. I’m not certain that we
create Movement all. I think we more or less live into movement. Movement
originates and is sustained by God alone.
Almost all of my time as a Christian has been in a quasi-denomination.
I was involved in it for over 20 years, and it has had some of the most spectacular
growth of any recent movement. I think, when the books have been written it
will go down as one of the genuine movements of the 20th century (or
at least a large part of it.) It had
its beginning in the “Jesus People” movement and continues to this day. I
personally believe that the “movement” part of their history is mostly over and
that they have gone into an organizational/protective mode–even though they
would disagree with me. Now as I say this next thing, know that I was not an “Insider”
in all the conversations, but I was involved as a pastor in this group (notice
how stealthy I am about not mentioning the name of the group – sneaky, very
sneaky). To the best of my knowledge, I was not aware of any continuing
strategic conversation about church planting the entire time I was involved.
During that time, the organization grew from one church to several thousand (+
Bible colleges, radio stations…a veritable empire of assets). It happened
something like this: a young person (a hippy then – now probably wearing an expensive suit, running a Fortune 500 company and despising others not like
them – in a word, they became, “the man”) would become a Christian and fall
deeply in love with Jesus in a town in California. That person would move to
another city in California, and take the gospel with him and begin
communicating Christ’s love in the new place. God would show up and do some
amazing (and most the time out of the box) Kingdom stuff; many others would
become Christians and the next thing ya knew, there was a new Christian
community formed. Voila'’! A church
was born! It was incredible, it
was messy, it was wild fire…it was “a Movement!” It was really built on the enthusiasm and sheer delight in
Jesus that each of these young people shared. It had very little strategy, if
any at all.
So, with all the talk about how we create movements, you’ll
have to forgive me if I am just a bit incredulous. I believe our role is to
prepare ourselves to “live inside” of what God does, not to try to create it.
Our job is to faithfully follow the Easter Jesus, the one that is alive and
vibrant in whatever context we live in. To follow what he said and to act like
he acted–in this way, we prepare ourselves to live into movement.
In the following posts, I will talk about movement from a Biblical/theological
perspective (considering John 20). Many people want to talk about it from a
sociological or methodological perspective. That is great.
I think both of those have validity and need conversation. I would, however, like to talk about it
from a biblical perspective. The risen Jesus created a movement that is
worldwide, and I get to be a part of it, even to this very day. What I want to
look at is how he prepared his followers to "live into the movement."