REFLECTIONS ON INTEGRATIVE MINISTRY

Daniel Montgomery and Mike Cosper, pastors at Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky

Some of you will remember the shifting landscape of evangelicalism at the turn of the century. At the time, we were twenty-five (Daniel) and nineteen (Mike) years old, preparing to plant Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky. The culture of church as we knew it was changing dramatically. Talk of “postmodernism” dominated conversations. Church planting was an experience of being unmoored, for better or worse. We were without oversight, free to shape the life and culture of this new church, Sojourn, as we saw best.

We soon discovered we were not alone in our quest. Many people were asking questions about ecclesiology and postmodernism, questions that would dramatically shape the next decade of North American Christianity. In a few short years, seeker-sensitive ministry — the biggest church trend in the late 1980s and ’90s — would all but disappear. The new buzzwords were emergent, organic, and holistic. People were talking about new Calvinism and neo-liturgical.

As young leaders with little in the way of guidance, we read voraciously, searching for the Holy Grail of ministry. We believed that somewhere out there was a book or a pastor or a strategy that could impart us with a center: a sense of identity or a way of organizing our ministry that made sense of the very real chaos of planting a church. In one way or another, we were attracted to, labeled by, or invited into a dozen different streams.

We encountered each of these voices like a pinball meeting a bumper, spinning and bouncing from one model to the next.

• “Maybe we should just get day jobs and turn Sojourn into a house church network.”

• “Or maybe we should do membership like the seventeenth-century Baptists, à la 9Marks.”

• “Let’s shoot some contemplative videos, like Nooma.”

• “We definitely need to read The Reformed Pastor by Richard Baxter.”

• “We also need more incense.”

• “Can you turn up my guitar amp?”

Our search led us through many of these streams, and we tried on each of them as the seasons of our church changed. You can see their influence in the evolution of our church’s vision statements:

2000: Our vision is to glorify God by enjoying him in community. (Our Piper-ian beginnings.)

2001: To challenge people who are saying no to God to say yes to God in every stage and facet of their lives.

2002: Created for Community. (Here we traded clarity for poetry. This was about the time some of our conservative friends and neighbors began to label us “emergent,” though that title never reflected any kind of reality at Sojourn.)

2003: Until Christ Is Formed in You. (This was the beginning of the Dallas Willard era at Sojourn, whom we labeled our patron saint for many years and continue to love and appreciate now.)

2007: To See the Gospel Change Everything, starting with us as individuals and spreading to our church community and outward to the city and the world.

The 2007 statement will sound familiar to those who’ve read Tim Keller. If it’s not directly lifted from him, it’s certainly inspired by him. That shift in 2007 marked what is best described as a wholesale reorganization of our church. By God’s grace, we were led to the conviction that the gospel was not merely the entrance point of the Christian life, but the center of it all. A Christian never graduates from the gospel; we grow in and through it.¹ What might sound obvious today was a new revelation for us. For most of our lives, the gospel was about “getting in” with God, and our perpetual struggle with our ministry identity was an endless reckoning with how to articulate what comes next.

In those years and in the years to come, Tim Keller and several others enabled us to see the gospel not just as an entryway but as a rallying point — a place to which both the believer and unbeliever are called back again and again. This led us to begin rethinking how we went about all of our ministries — preaching, worship, counseling, member care, community groups, and mercy ministry. Keller’s writings — especially the Redeemer Church Planting Manual on which many of these chapters are based — were our manifesto.²

Keller understands that the message of the gospel is complex and multilayered, and it compels us to mission in many different ways. Like many emergent voices, Keller shares a concern for contextualization. Like the new Calvinists, he shares a concern for the centrality of the cross. If you look at the pet causes of a wide variety of Christian traditions — spiritual formation, ministry to the poor, evangelism, and apologetics — you’ll find that Keller has at one time or another emphasized all of them, and Redeemer has found ways to give expression to all of them.

In chapter 2 of Center Church, Keller puts it this way: “There is an irreducible complexity to the gospel. I do not mean that the gospel can’t be presented simply and even very briefly . . . [Rather] I want to resist the impulse, mainly among conservative evangelicals, toward creating a single, one-size-fits-all gospel presentation that should be used everywhere, that serves as a test of orthodoxy.”³ And his vision for ministry is driven by this understanding of the gospel.

Integrative Ministry as Response to a Complex Gospel

So how does our approach to ministry relate to this “complex” understanding of the gospel? In the same way that Christians tend to latch on to one, and only one, way of communicating the gospel, churches and movements tend to latch on to one, and only one (or two), understandings about what the church is meant to do or be, and they shape their entire ministry around that. Keller reminds us that the gospel itself is what calls us to a greater breadth than any single ministry focus: “Because the gospel is presented to the world not only through word but also through deed and community, we should not choose between teaching and carrying out practical ministry to address people’s needs. Because the gospel renews not only individuals but also communities and culture, the church should disciple its people to seek personal conversion, deep Christian community, social justice, and cultural renewal in the city. These ministry areas should not be seen as independent or optional but as interdependent and fully biblical” (p. 103).

Anything less than an integrated, multifaceted ministry fails to accurately depict the complexity of the gospel. Keller writes, “The truth is that if we don’t make a strong effort to do all of these in some way at once, we won’t actually do any of them well at all. In other words, Center Church ministry must be integrative” (p. 104). Only a diverse and integrated approach can result in Christians who are “doing all the things the Bible tells us that Christians should be doing!” (p. 104).

Keller defines the work of the church primarily in the language of calling. He quotes Edmund Clowney: “The calling of the church to minister directly to God, to the saints, and to the world is one calling” (p. 108). This means that the various ways the church ministers and serves cannot be separated from one another. Keller lists four integrative ways of doing ministry (p. 107): (1) connecting people to God (through evangelism and worship); (2) connecting people to one another (through community and discipleship); (3) connecting people to the city (through mercy and justice); and (4) connecting people to the culture (through the integration of faith and work).

Notice that these are vision-oriented descriptions. Connecting people to God is an answer to the question, “What is the goal of evangelism and worship?” The same is true for the other three categories. Ministries exist for a reason — to move the church forward on its mission.

Integrative Ministry and Ecclesiology

We found it helpful to compare Keller’s definition of integrative ministry to the various approaches to ecclesiology outlined by Gregg Allison in his book Sojourners and Strangers. Much of what Keller says seems to fit with what Allison defines as “functional ecclesiology,” a way of defining the church based on its “activities, roles, or ministries.” It’s an ecclesiology that is based on what a church does. Citing missional church expert Craig Van Gelder, Allison lists six different versions of functional ecclesiology, including seeker-sensitive models and purpose-driven models. The sixth of these seems to match Keller’s understanding of how integrative ministry works: “a church for the twenty-first century that emphasizes the development of the church ‘as a major anchor of ministry that can specialize in a variety of niche markets.’ ”⁴

Yet Keller’s vision of integrative ministry also has elements of what Allison calls the “teleological approach” to ecclesiology — an approach in which the church is primarily defined by its telos, that is, its goal, objective, or vision. The structure of the church is based on what the church is for. Here Allison points to Jonathan R. Wilson’s definition for the church’s telos: “life in the kingdom and knowledge of Jesus Christ.”⁵ The church’s functions are not ends in themselves, but means to the greater end. In these chapters, we can see how Keller’s vision for integrative ministry has elements of this teleological approach. For example, each ministry (e.g., evangelism and worship) is linked to a larger vision statement (e.g., connecting people to God).

A Third Way: The Ontological Approach to Ecclesiology

While the teleological approach has advantages over the functional approach, Allison argues for a third way altogether — an ontological approach. An ontological approach “seeks to define and discuss the church in terms of its attributes and characteristics. For an example of this approach, we may consider the historical attributes as affirmed by the early church in the Apostle’s Creed: ‘I believe in one holy, catholic, and apostolic church.’ Unity, holiness, catholicity (or universality), and apostolicity were the four specific characteristics affirmed by the earliest Christians in their discussion and confession of the nature of the church. The key is to note that early church ecclesiology had a definite ontological orientation to it.”⁶

In other words, we must place a priority on understanding the “identity markers of the church.”⁷ Allison cites a brilliant question by Simon Chan that puts the urgency of the question into perspective: “Is the church to be seen as an instrument to accomplish God’s purpose in creation, or is the church the expression of God’s ultimate purpose itself?”⁸ To put it another way, is the church a means or an end? Do we place a priority on what the church does or on who the church is? Is the most important question its actions or its essence? Does the church make itself through action or does Christ make his beloved a new creation? Allison argues that the priority is on the church’s essence and identity, which are formed by God’s grace and precede both mission and ministry.

The ontological approach appropriately emphasizes the gospel as the catalyst for the church. The gospel transforms a people (the church), and their response to the gospel is the functional ministries of the church. What we do flows from who we are — who the gospel has made us. An ontological understanding of the church places a priority on the work of the gospel, which results in the work of the church.

With this in mind, it seems incongruent with Keller’s own articulations of the gospel to define the church in a functional way, as he seems to in these chapters. A functional ecclesiology says “do” and “do in order to be.” But where religion (or law) says “do,” the gospel says “done.” When we define the church by what it does, we subtly undermine the centrality of the gospel. We define the church, not by the gracious action of God, but by its ability to live up to God’s expectations for it.

An ontological ecclesiology starts with the declaration “It is finished.” Because the work is done, what remains is not a demand (to be the church, you must do these things), but an invitation to be who we are (because you are the church, you are free to do these things). The gospel forms the church, and the church lives out the gospel in all of the ways described in the New Testament.

The distinction here may seem too subtle. But it will shape how we approach ministry and understand ourselves as part of the church. It is particularly helpful pastorally. If we define the church functionally, then the ministries of the church tend to be a bar we’re perpetually trying to reach. Defined ontologically, the church’s ministries are an invitation to live out our identity in Christ.

Ontology and Worship

To make this more concrete, let’s examine the way Keller talks about the worship and preaching ministries of the church in chapter 5. Keller’s insight here and his ability to navigate the controversies around worship are absolutely brilliant. This chapter is a helpful, clear, and practical guide for pastors who are thinking about worship in their congregations. Keller’s descriptions of and prescriptions for evangelistic worship should be required reading for every pastor, worship leader, and worship planner.

Likewise, his admonition to pastors regarding their own cultural preferences expresses something seldom heard: “Far too many ministers create worship services that delight their own hearts but do not connect at all to people who are less theologically and culturally trained. In reply, the ministers maintain that this is ‘biblical’ or ‘rich’ worship, that in our culture people just want to be entertained, that we have to raise people up to a worthy level, not lower ourselves to their level, and so on. But quite often the problem is simply that the minister has created a service that inspires him and few others” (p. 118).

This chapter is enormously helpful, but here we would highlight our critique. Because Keller only addresses worship as a functional ministry, he misses the opportunity to make the connection between corporate worship and the New Testament reality of “all of life” worship (see, e.g., John 4:1 – 26; Rom 12:1; Col 3:17). As Harold Best describes it so well, “We do not go to church to worship. But as continuing worshipers, we gather ourselves together to continue our worship, but now in the company of brothers and sisters.”⁹

In Best’s framework, worship isn’t something we turn on and off. All of our lives are marked by “continuous outpouring,” a steady stream of praise toward something — whether it is God, self, or some created object. In Christ, that outpouring is gathered up and sanctified. He is — quite literally — our worship leader (Heb 8:1 – 2), and when we enter into a relationship with him by faith, all of our lives are gathered up and perfected in Christ (Phil 3:9).

So rather than seeing worship as a function (i.e., a duty or calling) that stands outside of ourselves, we need to learn to see it as fluidly connected to this deeper, gospel-formed reality: The gospel has made us (true) worshipers. We were always worshiping before Christ, though the object and quality of our worship was questionable. But in Christ, our whole lives are gathered up and made fragrant. An ontological understanding of the church frames our conversations about worship. What we do flows from who we are.

This distinction between a functional and ontological definition has significant implications for our pastoral practice in leading worship. For starters, the language of “connecting people to God” should be called into question. A worship service, in the light of unceasing worship, doesn’t actually connect people to God, unless we’re purely speaking in terms of evangelism (which Keller isn’t). As Best writes, “The Christian needs to hear but one call to worship and offer only one response.”¹⁰ A Christian arrives at a gathering already connected to God but not yet fully oriented to God’s world.

This raises the question of why the church is admonished to continue meeting (Heb 10:25). While a full answer would fill volumes,¹¹ we need look no further than the ancient church’s principle lex orandi, lex crendendi: The law of prayer is the law of belief, or in the vernacular, “So we pray, so we believe.” This principle illuminates a reality of worship that is all too easy for us to forget. While most folks are seriously committed to having their theology shape their worship practices, the inverse is also true: what we pray (or sing or declare together in prayers, creeds, and litanies) profoundly shapes our beliefs. This means our gatherings are crucial spaces for the spiritual formation of our congregations.

This is congruent with all that Keller has to say about contextualization and evangelistic worship. In fact, Keller’s thoughts on the need for clarity for the sake of outsiders applies equally to insiders. Thinking evangelistically will prevent pastors and worship leaders from using Christianese — stale, boring, uncontextualized language that Christians can process by rote without actually being challenged to think. (It’s worth mentioning that there’s no better example of this kind of preaching — with fresh language and contextual metaphors — than Tim Keller.)

But the goal of such clarity (in the case of believers) isn’t to connect them to God, but rather to edify them, to immerse them in the story of the gospel through word, prayer, bread, and wine in such a way that they are continually reoriented to life in God’s kingdom. Worship isn’t merely a function — something we do occasionally; it’s intrinsic to who we are. The gospel has made us (true) worshipers, and when we gather with the church, we worship in a way that forms and shapes our whole-life worship.

Ontology and Community

To further illustrate this, we take a look at chapter 6. Keller opens the chapter with a line that can be read ontologically: “The gospel creates community” (p. 133). But he doesn’t give us a vision for how community is formed and maintained. Instead we’re given descriptions of what community does, of its functions. “Community,” Keller writes, “is best understood as the way we are to do all that Christ told us to do in the world” (p. 146). He even uses the language of “function” when describing the ministry that happens in community (p. 134).

An ontological definition of community would start with the gospel and describe the effects of the gospel, and ministries would be seen as the fruitful outworking of the gospel. Keller describes the functions of community as witness, character, and behavior, and in this he’s right — these are all elements of what community does. But we would press further and ask, “How do we form and sustain this kind of community?”

When Paul describes community in the church in his letter to the Colossians, he approaches it ontologically: “Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all. Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you” (Col 3:11 – 13).

What the church does (loving one another, forgiving, bearing each other’s burdens, and so forth) flows from who the church is — a new humanity formed and united in Christ. Jesus illustrates this point vividly: “Pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother’ ” (Matt 12:49 – 50).

To be sure, this takes nothing away from the helpful way in which Keller talks about community. Our critique is not the content itself, but in the way the content is structured and presented. Is a functional description of community the best way to go about forming community?

Most Christians, at some point, find themselves frustrated with their community. Churches divide into sects and cliques. People are marginalized for socioeconomic, racial, and political reasons. Individuals struggle to feel at home because of their own cultural, psychological, and emotional reasons. As the disciples demonstrated, community can be powerful (e.g., Luke 10:1 – 24), but it can also be rather pathetic (e.g., Mark 10:35 – 45).

When divisions arise, our definitions help us to diagnose and address the problem. A functional definition of community points to the community itself and implies, “Try harder.” An ontological definition, on the other hand, tells us that something is wrong with our application of the gospel.

Operating with a functional understanding of community, a church might respond to racial divisions by reexamining its strategy for bringing people together and reaching out to people of different races and subcultures, and where they are creating opportunities for dialogue. All of these are good and probably necessary responses, but they may lack the fuel for real change if they aren’t connected with the gospel, which tells us we are “one new humanity” in Christ (Eph 2:15).

Community isn’t something we do; it is a way of describing the oneness that Jesus prayed for in John 17 and accomplished in his finished work, sending the Spirit to seal his promise and unite us forever. Our churches never have a “community problem.” Problems in community stem from problems in our understanding and application of the gospel.

Applying Keller’s Vision in Louisville

As we mentioned in our opening paragraphs, Keller’s work has profoundly influenced the way we approach ministry at Sojourn Community Church. Keller’s balanced definition of the gospel and his integrative vision for ministry were the inspiration for our own philosophy of ministry. But there were a few hindrances to applying his vision at our church. One, hinted at above, was the range of complexity Keller employs to describe the gospel (more on that to come). The second hindrance was the “functional versus ontological” approach to ecclesiology. We’ve addressed how those concerns affect our worship and community ministries, and in what follows, you’ll see how our approach is different in mercy and cultural engagement as well.

Once we became convinced of the centrality of the gospel, we sought to find a way to reorient all of our ministries so they were “gospel-centered.” Like Keller, we sought to ask, “What is the gospel?”

Keller answers this question by first noting the gospel’s irreducible complexity. He proceeds to provide two methods, three themes, and three aspects of the gospel to frame his answer, while noting that many other themes and aspects exist.

One important thing that can be said about this approach is that it is biblical. Keller’s approach honors the fact that the Scriptures are a mix of literary genres whose meanings are layered and interconnected. To narrowly define the gospel as only atonement or only a kingdom message or only [fill in the blank] betrays the nature of both the Scriptures and the gospel. Keller has done a fine job of emphasizing the priority of the atoning work of Jesus while retaining the broader implications of the gospel as essential to its meaning and purpose.

Our question is more pastoral in nature: Is this the best way to equip an individual with tools they can use to better understand the gospel, apply it to their lives, and proclaim it with others? To put it another way, is Keller’s method reproducible?

To us, what Keller is doing is akin to calculus, and while lots of folks love calculus, neither of us took any math class higher than high school algebra. We believe that Keller’s complex gospel approach is important, but there is also wisdom in giving folks a simple but broad framework for the gospel, one that an average church member can hold on to and reproduce, yet also one that provides inroads to all of the gospel’s layered depth.

Taking Keller’s work as our starting point, we developed a vision for doing ministry that is built on a threefold emphasis: A Whole Gospel for a Whole Church in the Whole World.¹²

Whole Gospel

We wanted to articulate an understanding of the gospel that is both comprehensible and appropriately nuanced. The whole gospel is one gospel with three aspects: God’s kingdom, God’s cross, and God’s grace. By focusing on the kingdom, we’re given inroads to talk about the narrative of redemption history. By focusing on the cross, we are able to talk about sin, atonement, and individual salvation. By focusing on God’s grace, we’re able to talk about the more intimate, relational dynamics of the gospel — God’s unconditional love, the doctrine of adoption, etc.

We believe this tri-perspectival understanding of the gospel provides enough simplicity to be memorable and enough depth to provide inroads to talking about the gospel in its many facets, and as we acknowledged in Faithmapping, we got this more or less from Keller.

Keller argues that there are three frameworks, or lenses, or aspects to the gospel — three ways to understand the gospel that are equally true and central for the Christian on his or her journey:

1. The gospel of Christ is the historical truth of Jesus, who lived, died, and was resurrected, paying for our sins with his life.

2. The gospel of sonship is about God’s radical, transforming, adopting grace. It’s about God’s accepting us because he accepts Jesus and not because of anything we’ve done.

3. The gospel of the kingdom is about God’s kingdom coming to earth through Jesus and through the church. It’s about the renewal of creation, the new-making of all things, a cosmic redemption project that has been inaugurated by Jesus.

The tendency, Keller argues, is to latch on to one or another of these aspects to the exclusion of the others. If we tend to see legalistic moralism as the problem, Keller says, we’ll gravitate toward the gospel of sonship “with more emphasis on . . . emotional freedom.” Likewise, if we tend to think that Christians are too relativistic and don’t respect God’s law, we’ll gravitate toward the gospel of Christ, which puts our sins on display in the crucified body of Jesus.¹³

Whole Church

From there, we began to examine how this message might shape our understanding of the church. We asked these questions:

What if, instead of starting with all the external definitions of “church,” we started with the internal definitions of the church — that the church is a population formed by the gospel? What if the conversation started there and flowed outward? What if the decisions we made as a church all had to come back to the centrality of that simple and deep message?¹⁴

Building from this foundation, we talk about what it means to be the church in terms of the church’s ontology — its identity in Christ. What the church does in ministry flows from who they are. After investigating the many images and actions of the church in Scripture, we came to emphasize five primary identities. So we talk about how the gospel makes us:

• worshipers — who are glorifying God gathered with his people and scattered throughout all of life

• family — who are united in Christ as a new community

• disciples — who are learning to live their lives as Jesus would were he in their place¹⁵

• servants — who are servants of God and servants of all

• witnesses — who testify to what they’ve seen and heard about God’s kingdom, cross, and grace¹⁶

What we do, then, flows from who we are. Ministries, instead of being functions, flow from these identities. Likewise, Christians (and the church) live out these identities in their whole lives. The challenge is not “achieve” but “be who you are; be who Christ has made you.”

Whole World

Just as we say, “Be who you are,” we say, “Be where you are.” We are the church gathered and scattered, and our whole lives are meant to be places where these identities find expression. As we unpack it, there are five dimensions to the world:

• location — where I am with my family

• vocation — where I work

• recreation — where I rest/play

• restoration — where there is need

• multiplication — where the gospel needs to be heard¹⁷

In his chapters about integrative ministry, Keller describes quite brilliantly how the church engages the city and the culture. We see a lot of crossover between his prescriptions for the city and what we call restoration, as well as culture and vocation. We would also add that multiplication — the evangelistic ministries of the church, whether we’re talking about interpersonal evangelism, church planting, or international missions — bleeds through in everything Keller writes here. We would note here too that the spiritual formation that happens in the church forms people for their family lives as well. Likewise, the gospel invites us to a radically countercultural recreation. The church has a dimension of recreation that includes rest, a forgotten virtue of our culture. Because the gospel provides us with a new identity, we’re freed from finding our identity in our work, whether it’s in the marketplace, the church, the education system, or as a stay-at-home parent. We can recreate and rest.

So to compare side by side:

	KELLER	MONTGOMERY/COSPER
GOSPEL	“Gospel Calculus” Two methods: systematic, narrative Three major themes: (Home/Exile, Yahweh/Covenant, and Kingdom) Three aspects: the incarnation and the “upside-down” aspect, the atonement and the “inside-out” aspect, and the resurrection and the “forward-back” aspect	Kingdom Cross Grace
CHURCH	1. Connecting people to God (through evangelism and worship) 2. Connecting people to one another (through community and discipleship)	Worshipers Disciples Family Servants Witnesses
WORLD	3. Connecting people to the city (through mercy and justice) 4. Connecting people to the culture (through the integration of faith and work)	Location Vocation Recreation Restoration Multiplication

This chart is helpful in how it illustrates exactly what Keller means by integrative ministry. For him, the work of the church must extend beyond the ways the church ministers to itself. Integrative ministry means placing mercy ministries and faith and work ministries on an equal platform with church gatherings — both large (in preaching and worship) and small (in community). It’s remarkable to consider the implication here. Most would agree you can’t faithfully preach the gospel without ministries like preaching and worship, but Keller is also implying that you aren’t faithfully preaching the gospel without some engagement with mercy ministry and faith and work ministry. It’s a challenge to many ministry models, and it reflects the nuanced and many-layered understanding of the gospel that Keller preaches.

Our model seeks to communicate these same concepts by seeing our identities not only as functions in the church but also as ways we live out our whole lives. We are [fill in an identity], no matter where we are in the world. All of this depends on an ontological understanding of the church to make sense of it.

Conclusion

The task of critiquing Tim Keller makes us feel like Hobbits critiquing Gandalf. Just as he might scold them about how “a wizard is never late,” we are quite certain that Dr. Keller is never uncertain of the church’s ontology.

So we offer these critiques humbly, desiring that they might illuminate without obscuring the vision you read in Keller’s chapters on Integrative Ministry. These chapters have been extremely helpful and important in shaping our own ministry. We feel certain that if you read them carefully, they will be profoundly practical for bringing the gospel to the center of every ministry in your church.