CHAPTER 1
A BUTT-KICKING IS A TERRIBLE THING TO WASTE
Reaching the Unreached Isn’t a New Thing . . . It’s a New Testament Thing
Fight the good fight of the faith.
1 TIM. 6:12
I keep telling you, you listen to me more, you live longer!
SHORT ROUND
The morning of the epic beatdown of my life, I was a missionary in Port Talbot, a rough steel-working town in Wales, United Kingdom. I was to be welcomed as the evangelist at Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s legendary church, Sandfields. To this day, I don’t know what I did to anger him—not Lloyd-Jones, he was dead, but the 300-plus pound rugby player on the Juice. I was new to driving on the “wrong” side of the road, so maybe I triggered his ‘roid-fueled rage by doing something stupid. I may never know. In any case, as he pulled alongside us, he flipped us off, British style, gesturing with a backward peace sign and shouting through the rolled-up window. Like a bad kung-fu film, his mouth was moving, but nothing intelligible could be heard through the glass of his car window.
I thought no more of it, pulling over to park in front of the church. But as I made my way around the building, he was across the street, beckoning me to come over to the entrance of an alley, postured like he wanted to tell me a secret.
The secret was that he was going to beat a hole into the street with my head. Unaware of his intentions, I crossed the street to explain myself. Since I was going into a church building, I didn’t want him to associate my stupidity with Jesus.
Rounding the corner, I approached him, attempting to explain myself with the universal blanket statement for stupidity in the UK.
“I’m a yank.”
That usually did the trick.
As I got within reach, he lunged at me, screaming. I’m a short guy—five feet, seven inches. He hefted me effortlessly off of the ground, my feet dangling inches above terra firma. For a half second it was as if my childhood dream of being an astronaut was being fulfilled.
Then the shaking started.
He simultaneously shook me and bellowed obscenities into my face. He shook so hard that the next day, bruises formed in the shapes of his fists from where he’d bunched my sweater in his hands.
Then the throwing started.
Depending on your point of view, the brick wall that stopped the throwing could have been a bad or good thing. But before I had time to get back to my feet, he utilized a rugby move, flipping me facedown.
Then the hitting started.
All five hundred pounds of pressure per square inch of haymaker barreled down on the back of my skull, only the asphalt getting between me and oblivion. As he hammered me into unconsciousness, my forehead split open, crunching the front of my skull into the pavement. The solitary eyewitness—a woman parking her car across from the alleyway—later reported to police that he appeared to have no intention of stopping. She shouted repeatedly, “He’s killing him!” as he rained down blows on my limp form. Her panicked screams probably saved my life. The scar just above my left eye reminds me of the valuable lesson I learned that day . . . next time, run.
But running would have caused me to miss another lesson about not walking down dark alleys in the UK. Nobody likes a beatdown, but beatdowns can reimburse with wisdom what they cost in pain.
IN THE CAGE WITH JESUS
That wasn’t the first time I had my butt kicked.
Being five feet, seven inches tall doesn’t give many martial advantages other than providing a bit of a fighting spirit. Some call it “short man syndrome.” When I was a teenager, my high school coach called it being a “punk.”
I guess he was right. I am a punk, and I owe a lot of that to my short stature. I might need to climb a tree Zacchaeus-like to see Jesus walking past, but looking up at the world from my low-to-the-ground vantage point gives a man an interesting perspective. Being a punk with short man syndrome has taught me that a butt-kicking is a terrible thing to waste. A knee to the crotch, a boot to the head, a fist to the nose—getting wailed on from time to time offers an even more unique angle. Right now, the church seems small, acts a bit like a punk, and seems to be facedown on the street, spitting blood. I’m just not sure that it’s learned its lesson or gained any new perspective. Throughout history, when the church has been in that place, Jesus has used the experience to flip us on our back, so that all we can do is look up.
I can’t picture Jesus kicking anyone when they are down, but there are some things Jesus said to the seven churches of Asia to give them a new perspective despite being painful to hear. Sometimes I confess wanting to run from those passages myself. Probably because I see myself in them so much. Nevertheless, when you love somebody, you sometimes have to say some things that might inflict necessary pain . . . and I hear that Jesus loves us quite a bit.
That’s why in Revelation 2 and 3, he says some very encouraging things to his church, but also says things that must have hurt:
▪ I have a few things against you.
▪ There are some among you who hold to the teaching of Balaam.
▪ You have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead.
▪ If you do not wake up, I will come like a thief.
▪ Because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.
▪ You do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.
▪ You have forsaken the love you had at first.
The PJV (Peyton Jones Version) translates that last one, “You don’t love me like you used to” or as Bill Medley sang, “You’ve lost that lovin’ feelin’ . . . now it’s gone, gone, gone.” Undoubtedly hard to hear, yet necessary for the relationship to return to full health. No matter how many times I’ve read those words in Revelation 2 and 3, I stagger away—dazed, with a ringing in my ears—but my soul is refocused and righted. There’s nothing like getting your rear end lovingly handed to you by Jesus. Unlike a beating from a rugby player, it heals as much as it hurts. Indiana Jones’s inspiration was a treasure hunter named Fedora, who tells Indy after he loses his first fight, “You lost today, kid, but that doesn’t mean you have to like it.” Not being crazy about confrontation, even with a good God, we usually avoid it like the plague. We run.
Why? Because although we’re redeemed, the church is still a pooled amalgam of fallen humanity. We sew fig leaves for a living, trying to cover our nakedness. Over time, we’ve improved our skill at covering our naughty bits, but haven’t improved upon Adam and Eve’s lack of ability to humbly admit when we’re wrong.
Perhaps the hardest jabs to the face in the letters to the seven churches is, “You have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead” (Rev. 3:1). I imagine many people parking in the pews Sunday after Sunday can feel the deadness, despite attempts to put on a grand show up front. Like a WWE wrestler, we swagger across the stage, swinging at the air, faking clotheslines, stomping our feet in thunderclaps full of bravado, and talking tough. At some point, we stopped being the underground, countercultural dynamic force that we were during the first century. If our goal was to become a giant, then we may have reached our goal, at the cost of being a sleeping one. So the sleeping giant slumbers on . . . and dreams about how awesome it is.
When we lose our ability to collectively examine ourselves, we miss out on the necessary reexaminations, re-dresses, and rectifying work that would ensure the Church stays the dynamic, radical, cutting-edge movement it was designed to be. Is it any wonder that God occasionally has to raise his voice to rouse us from our slumber? Jesus’s perpetual marching orders of mission echo down through the centuries because we still haven’t accomplished the goal of reaching the ends of the earth.
Before I took that beatdown, I was sure I could take care of myself. I imagined I was tougher than I was. Like the seven churches of Asia, the church today imagines the same.
And we’re still getting our butt kicked.
And with that butt-kicking comes a choice; stop and spar with Jesus’s words and stand a fighting chance, or keep taking the pounding that has kept us pinned and knocked senseless. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, after Indy had five Nazis test him out as a human punching bag, his old flame Marion asks him where it hurts. Each cut, bruise, or scrape that he points to gets a kiss. Jesus’s words rough us up a bit, but are an invitation to vulnerability, so he can heal those areas with a kiss.
CHASING THE CHICKEN
I’m not any crazier about taking a beating than anybody else, but I hold to the Proverb “blows and wounds scrub away evil” (Prov. 20:30). In the movie Rocky, nobody wanted the big lug to win like Mickey did. “Mick” was the cranky shriveled little Irish guy who served as Rocky’s coach. Rocky could stay the bum that boasted of beating Spider Rico, or he could become a real champion. And because Mickey saw that Rocky could be a contender, he ran him hard, gave him grief, and made him chase the chicken. He was willing to give Rocky the kick up the backside that a champion needs, but nobody wants. Because that’s what coaches do. They discipline those that they love (Heb. 12:1–11).
In the same way, Jesus saw the unreached potential of the seven churches of Asia and jumped into the octagon for a sparring match, knowing the value of a good kicking to toughen them up for the real fight. Nobody loves the church as much as Jesus, who bled for it, but he’ll confront it if they climb into bed with the stuff he hates, and tell it, “No Boom Boom!” When we’re flat on our backs, he’ll get down on his knees and yell at us to get up again . . . because he loves us . . . and he loves the lost around us. If we really are God’s heavyweight contender in the fight of the ages, taking an occasional beating should be an expected occupational hazard of being a damage dealer for the Kingdom.
If our eyes swell up so bad we can’t see, Jesus will be like Mickey cutting the eye, to help return our clear vision to keep us in the fight. Jesus seems to hold to the proverb “Faithful are the wounds of a friend” (Prov. 27:6).
Jesus wasn’t afraid to ask Peter if he loved him that third time on the beach, knowing it would hurt Peter (John 21:17). Christ was unafraid to put his finger on the sensitive broken place, pin-pointing exactly where Peter needed healing. The letters to the seven churches help us to see how Jesus responds to churches that don’t have it all together. Churches like ours. Am I alone in wondering what Jesus might say to the church today? Churches who have failed to fulfill the mission mandate to reach the unreached? Would he diagnose our vision as myopic? Would he pronounce the same painful verdict on our churches that he proclaimed regarding the church in Jerusalem, as swapping a house of prayer for a den of thieves?
Churches who have lost their way?
Churches who are starting to go down for the count?
Churches who don’t know what hit them?
Churches like ours?
This isn’t the first time the church has gotten its butt kicked by the world. Nor is it the first time it had to hear some tough guy stuff from Jesus. Throughout church history, God has raised up prophets and reformers like Martin Luther, William Tyndale, John Wycliffe, John Calvin, and Jon Huss who loved the church enough to jump into the cage and give all they got. God sends men like A. W. Tozer, John Wesley, J. Hudson Taylor, or Keith Green to deliver some kidney punches that bring us to our knees again; and we’re better for it. Like the prophets of old, these men served as the metaphorical spiritual cage fighters of their day and were equally hated by the establishment because they stood for Jesus and raged against the machine. More often than not, however, we let our prophets go to waste. Has our perspective needed as much correction as the church in Jerusalem, the church prior to the reformation, or the church at other critical times before revival? Generally, the church throughout history has not been aware of its condition any more than when the letters to the seven churches were written, and has often ignored what Jesus has to say. Jesus remarked that if people didn’t listen to him, they probably hadn’t listened to his prophets either.
I’m no prophet. I’m just a knucklehead who can’t shut up, like Martin Luther whose love for the church compelled him to “squawk as a goose among the swans.”1 I love the church. A lot. And writing this book has been like wrestling the angel, but my prayer is that you inherit the blessing. I may walk with a limp, have some scars, and have experienced my fair share of bare-knuckled beatdowns in order to be a temple raider.
But that’s all an occupational hazard for those who were meant to make a dent in this world . . . and there I go talking about myself again. I’ll do a little bit of that in this book, but I’m really talking about you and how you fit into Jesus’s plan to reach the unreached. Therefore I intend to draw your attention to Jesus as he lays out his strategy for a church wired for impact. It may sometimes feel like the world is spinning, and you can barely focus, but if you can get up on your feet, you’ll be the champion that Jesus knew you could be. Jesus wants the world to see the marks of his own fighting style in us as we swing like the heavyweights he died to make us. Like Mickey, Jesus has some words that will hurt, but ultimately reverse the decline that we find ourselves in, get our backs off the ropes, and help turn this fight around.
As demonstrated by the letters to the seven churches, the early church was far from perfect. They got a lot of things wrong. They invented a lot of heresy. They stalled out and moved in fits and starts, but when they were refocused and righted back on mission, they were masters at reaching their generation. I believe that’s what Jesus was trying to do in the letters to the seven churches. He was trying to refocus them back on the original mandate in Acts 1:8, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” That had been the last thing he’d spoken about to the church at large before his ascension. It is still his last word to all of us. If we take an honest look at ourselves, let Jesus speak to us, and refocus back on that original mandate, I believe we’ll take less butt-kicking and start kicking more butt. Just like they did in Acts.
KICKING BUTT FIRST-CENTURY STYLE
Have you ever read the book of Acts? It all started out so well. Pentecost was only one generation before John’s letters to the seven churches, demonstrating how quickly the fight turns around. In Acts, the church was doing the butt-kicking. In the letters to the seven churches of Asia, it’s hard to tell who’s doing the lion’s share of kicking—the world, the church, or Jesus. In Acts 1:7–8 Jesus lays out the mission strategy, “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” These words were a response to the disciples lined up in front of Jesus, ready for the end of the world to be served up just after breakfast. They had asked if now was the time for Jesus to restore the kingdom of the world to Israel. Jesus politely told them that kingdom restoration was none of their business, but from that moment on, they would be in the business of kingdom expansion.
Let’s reword that conversation slightly.
“Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Translation: Jesus, can we finish breakfast before you smite our enemies, and then we all go to heaven like bosses?)
Jesus replied, “It’s not for you to know the times or dates that the Father has set by his own authority.” (Translation: Guys, that’s none of your business . . .) “But you will receive power . . . and you will be my witnesses . . . to the ends of the earth.” (Translation: All this time you thought that the Father was in the restoration business, but first he’s going to be expanding his business to the four corners of the globe, and you are a part of it at the ground level!)
The book of Acts unfolds in terms of the geographical expansion of the gospel from the epicenter of Jerusalem: “in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” You could literally pull out a map of the Mediterranean and trace the entire structure of the book of Acts following Jesus’s outline in Acts 1:8.
Here, I’ll prove it:
▪ In Acts 1–7: We see them waiting in Jerusalem for the power to accomplish the mission of expanding the kingdom. “You will receive power . . . and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem . . .”
▪ In Acts 8: Thanks to the persecution of Saul, the kingdom expands throughout Judea, even spreading to Samaria. “In all Judea and Samaria . . .”
▪ In Acts 9–28: The kingdom breaks beyond the Jewish barrier into “the ends of the earth.” Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, is converted in chapter nine. Peter has a vision, and finally accepts his mission to the Gentile world starting with Cornelius in chapter 10. From chapter 11 to the end of the book, Luke chronicles the expansion of the kingdom, eventually to Rome, the epicenter of the known world.
The rest is literally history.
From Jerusalem, the church spreads to the borders of the known world, or to the ends of the earth. Even though kingdom expansion is clearly in focus, we can easily be mistaken as the early disciples were, believing that kingdom restoration is the name of the game. We demonstrate this by opting to establish rather than multiply, or by building upward instead of spreading outward. We try to keep people in, instead of sending them out. We make Christianity about a show of force. Taking over. Being a presence. Getting big. Showing them all. Like the disciples in the first chapter of Acts, we obsess over the second coming when the majority of the world still hasn’t heard of the first. In the nineties all we talked about was getting raptured, in an echo of the disciples’ first order of business, “Can’t we just go home now, Lord?”2
Nope.
There was work to do after breakfast that morning, and I’m not talking about dish duty. Acts reveals how the disciples reached the unreached in a pagan world. If we stand a fighting chance to impact our world, reaching the unreached, we’re going to need to unpack what got the job done in the first century.
WHERE IS THE GOD OUR FATHERS TOLD US ABOUT?
Acts is the story of Jesus working powerfully through frail and broken humanity to aggressively expand his Church. But Acts wasn’t written to show us how to do church. It was written to show us how to advance the Church in an unreached world. Talk about reaching the unreached! Nobody has had the challenge that the early church did. As the world’s first Christians, they were the only Christians in the world. All the vast unconverted pagan empires lay before that small pack of Jewish boys and girls that Jesus commissioned. If anybody should be counted experts at reaching the unreached, it was they. Because to them, everybody they came into contact with was unreached.
But they took Acts 1:8 seriously, and lived that verse out to fulfillment. If we want to witness kingdom expansion like the apostles did, it’s not enough to know what they knew. We need to do what they did. Two thousand years later, we flatter ourselves over and above our first-century counterparts, imagining we have the advantage of superior knowledge. Mission theorists traffic speaking circuits and endless conferences about “How to Reach the Unchurched” while failing to “get out there” themselves. The film Raiders of the Lost Ark contrasts Indiana Jones’s swashbuckling adventures with his day job as an archaeology professor in the lecture halls of Princeton. But we never seem to graduate beyond making profound statements, to actually raiding sunken temples. Now is not the time in church history to wax lyrical. Ours is a day for living out, not sounding smart. Besides, the church has fewer answers than it realizes, or it would demonstrate more impact. We should be asking the right questions instead of providing wrong answers. As a rabbi, Jesus’s method of teaching involved asking searching questions. In the gospels, Jesus asks 307 questions but only answered two. Why? Because Jesus knew that when we start asking questions, we begin to experience breakthroughs and gain deeper insight into our situations.
During the days of the Judges, bandits and enemies had the Israelites’ backs to the ropes, beating their self-dependency out of them. There are eerie parallels between the days when “everyone did what was right in their own eyes” (Judg. 21:25 ESV) and our gimmicks, antics, and overconfidence today. Gideon may have been a coward, hiding in the bottom of a winepress against the onslaught of what was befalling his culture, but he turned the tide when he started asking the right questions.
“If the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us?” (Judg. 6:13).
“Where are all his wonders that our ancestors told us about?” (Judg. 6:13).
I have a sneaking suspicion God’s been waiting quite a while for us to ask the right questions. But the important questions don’t sell books. The right questions are seldom popular. Asking them often guarantees that you won’t be asked back to speak again. I don’t have the corner market on the right questions, but some of them sound like:
▪ Why does the church seem to be losing when we’re on the winning team?
▪ Why does the average Christian seem bored when Jesus is supposed to provide life more abundant?
▪ Why do most of the stories we hear about God working powerfully, like he did in Acts, tend to come from missionaries?
▪ Has the dynamic faith we read about in Acts been tamed into an impotent ghost of its former self?
▪ Have we replaced the power of the Holy Spirit with automation, processes, systems, money, and crowds?
▪ Why have we stripped mission of risk and faith, and opted for security instead of dependence upon God?
▪ What’s the way back to becoming the dynamic force that Jesus unleashed on the world two thousand years ago?
▪ Does the church even know it has lost its way, or is it like the Laodiceans, blind, poor, and wretched without realizing it?
Perhaps you’ve asked some of those questions yourself but are coming up empty. In the famous brawl scene in the Cairo bazaar, Indiana Jones takes on a handful of thugs until a twirling sword master donned in black, steps into the clearing. Indy simply reaches for his trusty revolver, abruptly ending the fight.
I always wonder why he didn’t lay hold of the more powerful weapon in the first place. It would have saved so much time and trouble. It’s time the church asked that same question. We’ve got the invitation to receive the arsenal in Acts, and still we attempt to outsource what can only come from an eternal source. Incessantly firing blanks, the church appears to always be looking for another silver bullet. Perhaps we’ve ignored the real firepower at our disposal simply because what’s not working is more convenient, comfortable, and familiar than what would actually work.
WHAT’S BEHIND DOOR NUMBER TWO?
I train a lot of church planters. You’d think that ministers planting a church would be able to strip it all back to the essentials, but it’s at this level that I often see how we’re tempted to reproduce newer versions of what’s not working. We replace the power of an unpredictable God, wild to the core, with what is secure, manageable, and predictable. We opt for what’s behind door number two. “I’ll take critical mass, 100,000 dollars, and fail-safe formulas, Chuck!” Thus we’ve eschewed risk that necessitates the kind of faith that results in the unexpected workings of God. Gone are the days where people fell on their faces and cried, wept, and fasted for their communities, asking God to break in and do what he alone could do. Careful, corporate church systems are more predictable than a God who blows like the wind and doesn’t feel obligated to explain everything. But if we’re not careful, we run the risk of sacrificing true spiritual power—the only thing that makes accomplishing the mission possible—for the false “power” of numbers, money, and savvy. Western culture tells us to systematize, automate, or medicate away any minor annoyance. Could it be that we’ve done the same with our spiritual challenges? Have we exchanged rote programs and clever church branding for the work of the Holy Spirit? The answer for the complex issues facing the early church as well as the challenges faced in the Old Testament was simply to return to him.
Last time I read, “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.” (Rev. 3:20), the message was clear.
Jesus wants his church back.
ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES!
Remember Indiana Jones substituting the temple god with a bag of sand at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark? Substituting Jesus’s words is like substituting your sacred morning coffee with dirty water. “Accept no cheap substitutes” is a misnomer. Cheap substitutes are costly. Ask Indy what the cost was of substituting a golden idol with a bag of sand—it brought the whole temple crashing down around him. Our substitutes have cost us our ability to effectively reach the world around us, and the church has been crumbling as a result.
So just what exactly have we been substituting? Perhaps a better question might be, in substituting one thing for another, what has been sacrificed in the process? If Jesus wrote seven letters to the church today, what might they say?
▪ You’ve sacrificed reach for size
▪ You’ve sacrificed adventure for security
▪ You’ve sacrificed significance for “success”
▪ You’ve sacrificed the mission for meetings
▪ You’ve sacrificed my power for programs
▪ You’ve sacrificed my approval for applause
Jesus told the lukewarm Laodiceans that they were poor, blind, and naked like a cold water contradiction to their self-perception of being rich, successful, and content. True, his word choices would earn Jesus a troll-label in social media circles. But if we’ve become guilty of building church as a brand, drinking the American “bigger-is-better” success-syndrome Kool-Aid, smacking the cyanide cocktail out of our hands is the most loving thing he could do.
Look, if his love for the church is strong enough to die for it, then that love always tells the truth, even if it hurts. Jesus reminded the Laodiceans that, “those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent” (Rev. 3:19 ESV). True to his character, Jesus relentlessly comes after his bride like Hosea, refusing to abandon us to our idolatrous condition. Like the lover he is, he invites himself to dinner so we can talk over the details and get back on track. Although we’ve abandoned his mission, he’s not abandoned the church. He refuses to abandon us, just as he refuses to abandon the world we’re called to reach.
Carey Nieuwhof said:
I understand that the idea of the church being imperfect makes some people despair. But rather than making us despair, the fact that Jesus started the church with imperfect people should make us marvel at God’s incredible grace. That God would use ordinary, broken human beings as vessels of his grace, and delight in it is awe-inspiring. He’s proud of how his grace is beating through your imperfect-but-redeemed life and through the church. The idea that God would use you and me is pretty amazing. He had other options.3
He may have had other options, but he’s never made other plans.*
The church doesn’t need to be perfect to reach the unreached, and neither do you. God has always planned to win this war against the kingdom of hell with bullet-riddled planes. In the European amphitheater during World War II, too many Allied planes were shot down in flames. They put a statistician named Abraham Wald on the job to research where he should attach extra armor to protect the fly guys. When a plane returned from battle full of holes, he put a mark on every spot that a bullet pierced. When he calculated all of his data, he put the extra armor in the places that had the fewest holes, not the most. He reasoned that the bullet holes in the returned planes were random luck rather than the skill of the enemy pilot. He further reasoned that the planes that were getting shot down were getting shot in places the returning planes were not. Vital places. It was the holes that he wasn’t seeing—in the planes that weren’t returning—that needed extra protection. The spots that didn’t have bullet holes in the returning planes were where the fuselage was, and putting extra armor there turned the tide of the battle for the skies.4 Today, our church buildings may be shiny new planes, but they don’t seem to get airborne anymore. I’d rather be bullet ridden and busted up, yet winning the war. What if, in the church’s crisis of today, everybody’s patching the bullet holes and putting armor where it’s not needed? Here are some of the voices bombarding the leaders of the church:
“Get better marketing.”
“Make your website better.”
“Buy my course for $39.99 a month.”
Our search for success has diverted us from the timeless principles in the book of Acts. We need to patch up the parts of church that people aren’t talking about because, to be frank, we’re not hearing enough about the first century. A return to first-century spirituality will result in first-century results. Francis Chan once asked a room full of Christians, “How many of you read the book of Acts and think, ‘Man, I wish I lived in those days’?” He waited while a room full of hands shot up. Then he shocked the room, “Okay, I’m not talking to those of you who raised your hands. I want to spend the next few minutes talking to those of you in here who still believe the stuff in the book of Acts can happen today.” The same God that moved in the Middle East two thousand years ago is on the move today, proving that reaching the unreached like they did in the first century is still possible in our age. The church of the Global South currently resembles the church of the first century, witnessing explosive growth unlike anything in the West.
AGAINST THE ODDS
In the same way that contemporary painters look back to the old Masters for inspiration, we need to cast our eyes back on the missiological principles of the early church. In one generation, the apostles turned the world upside down and had become a threat to the Roman Empire. Within three hundred years, they’d spread so rapidly, they made up ten percent of the population of that empire.5 Whenever Indiana Jones traveled the world, a map on the screen traced a trajectory as a red arrow. The first-century church expanded at breakneck speed across the map of the known world at a much faster rate. Paul ran around expanding the kingdom like a chicken with its head cut off, whereas we roll around clucking with our legs cut off. Until we’ve mastered planting twenty-four churches in eleven years like Paul did, we’d probably better pull up a chair and listen to what Dr. Luke has to say about how the West was won. Because right now, we’re not losing the West. We’ve lost it. C. S. Lewis said, “There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.”6 Like Indiana Jones’s arch enemy Belloq, Satan has snatched any ground gained, mocking us, “Once again Jones, what was briefly yours is now mine.”7 I don’t know if you’ve been keeping score, but Western culture has us bowed and cowed, and we haven’t won a single culture war in the past few decades. Instead, we’ve opted to make lesser, fleeting, and insignificant stands of morality at the cost of lasting eternal impact.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his insightful letter from the Birmingham jail cell that still rings true today.
So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an arch defender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent—and often even vocal—sanction of things as they are. But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.8
THE ART OF MOVING CHRISTIANS AROUND
I know what you’re thinking. Can it really be that bad? We can’t be all that blind, poor, naked, and failing with all the TV and radio stations, big buildings, and bumper stickers.
Ed Stetzer reports that 80–85 percent of American churches are on the downside of their life cycle, thirty-five hundred to four thousand churches close each year, and the number of unchurched has almost doubled from 1990 to 2004.9
He reports:
▪ In 1900, there were 28 churches for every 10,000 Americans.
▪ In 1950, there were 17 churches for every 10,000 Americans.
▪ In 2000, there were 12 churches for every 10,000 Americans.
▪ In 2011, the latest year available, there were 11 churches for every 10,000 Americans.10
The research also showed that in the hundred years between 1900 and 2000, “the number of churches increased just over 50 percent while the population of the country has almost quadrupled”11
As our congregations have shrunk in recent years, leaders have hired consulting experts to tag and bag the beast that’s devouring their churches. Rather than spinning our wheels by asking what’s causing the problem, we need to concentrate on the last thing that Jesus told us to do. Go. In the Great Commission, we find answers to the perpetual problem instead of endless surveys and white papers. Jesus saves us from introspectively staring at our navels to gain enlightenment about the problem, and points us to the solution of becoming the answer. Despite what the experts have been selling, the solution isn’t slapping a sexier logo on a website, or adding a couple of signs, or remodeling a building to advertise more of what the world’s not buying. Perhaps those things can gather a crowd, but heck, P. T. Barnum and Bailey can do that. I thought we were trying to reach the lost, not run a circus. Richard Stearns wrote, “The church that causes the demons to shudder is the church hell-bent on finishing the job that Christ commanded the church to do. Just as Odysseus tied himself to the mast so that he would not be lured off course, so, too, must our churches focus unwaveringly on completing the unfinished mission of the kingdom.”12
Like Indy replacing the temple god with a bag of sand, we’ve replaced Spirit-empowered evangelism with marketing—mistaking them for the same thing. Nevermind that our temples seem to be crashing down on our heads. Marketing should supplement evangelism, not substitute it. The difference between the two is that marketing enters the conversation people are already having and cashes in on it. Evangelism creates a new conversation, initiating a thirst for something people don’t necessarily want, yet realize they desperately need. In effect, marketing appeals to a desire that’s already there. Evangelism creates a desire that wasn’t there before. Marketing will draw Christians to “sexier” churches. Evangelism will create Christians out of non-Christians and create a need for new churches once people come to faith.
Marketing and attracting crowds of Christians from other churches is what leaders fall back on when they don’t have the nerve to hit the front lines and actually reach lost people. It comes from a lack of faith, and quite frankly, the art of shuffling Christians around in a game of musical churches isn’t biblical. When the music stops, we still aren’t reaching the lost. There are many books, seminars, and talks that will teach you how to reorganize Christians into shiny new boxes like a Christian Martha Stewart, but unlike Martha’s mantra, it’s not “a good thing.” In Jurassic Park, Dr. Ian Malcom noted that the mess they were in was because “the scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, that they didn’t stop to think if they should.” When boiled down, the techniques really amount to the science of osmosis between the semi-permeable membranes between two churches. I don’t want weird science, I’m hunting for art; the lost art of reaching the unreached.
THE SLIDE INTO DARKNESS
Perhaps our unwillingness to return to first-century principles is because we believe that we face worse odds than our first-century counterparts. The reality is that the spiritual, philosophical, and societal climate that Paul and the apostles stepped into is not all that different from the brave new world the church faces today. On a practical level, our post-Christian world is very much like the apostles’ pre-Christian world, and if the challenges are the same, then so are the solutions. Rediscovering the first-century tactics will result in us reaching our own unreached generation just as they did.
Let’s briefly examine the intersection of the first and twenty-first centuries to find common ground. Like society today, first-century society in the Roman Empire was a blend of religions in a unified political system that had loosely thrown them together. Faiths, values, and cultural customs blended due to the trade routes connecting the world similar to how the Internet brings us new goods and information. Among the educated was a deep skepticism of religion—in spite of the social norms of public Roman worship and competing world religions complete with the ensuing confusion, cynicism, and distrust of religion in general. Philosophy was elevated above religious dogma among the educated, but masked deep primitive superstitions below the surface among the general populace. Despite intellectual ascension over religious beliefs in Western society, the underlying pervasive belief in aliens, fear of ghosts, and acceptance of karma live in contradiction to the claims of science. Thus the inconsistency of our core beliefs betrays that we still fear what we don’t understand, while unconvincingly claiming to understand everything. Superstition remains the underside of our intellectual achievements because our souls intrinsically know something that rationalism cannot prove, and won’t be dismissed: the knowledge that we are not alone in the universe.
Decades before America, Europe began to slide back into this all-too-human posture in the early twentieth century. Into this atmosphere of skepticism, C. S. Lewis hit the scene and broadcast Mere Christianity over the airwaves to war-torn Britain. War-time Brits listened to an intelligent bare-bones apologetic of Mere Christianity because the sheer number of casualties left them in touch with their own mortality. Lewis connected with his post-modern audience through rationalizing the irrational, while also arguing the irrationality of rationalism. Cold rationalism had fallen short, and left the British public with an even greater spiritual longing than they’d known before. Lewis spoke into that spiritual vacuum and gave unflinching, faithful, and reasonable answers to the spiritual questions of the British populace.
What does that have to do with us in America? Have you noticed that as the spiritual climate grows colder in America, C. S. Lewis’s writings somehow seem prophetically relevant to our culture nearly one hundred years later? What is the reason if not that America has finally caught up to Britain in the 1940s in its downward spiritual spiral and is now on a spiritual parallel? The reality is that when Lewis writes to war-torn Britain, he speaks to where America is today. Like never before, he hearkens like a prophetic voice from the future. When I immigrated to Europe in the late nineties, I felt like a time traveler, beholding America’s future. In the nineties, our megachurches were at the tapering end of their growth spurt and had begun to plateau. We just didn’t realize it. There was another growth spurt in 2001 after 9/11 hit, as people came through our doors looking for answers. They quickly dispersed after they discerned we didn’t have anything that reached beyond Sunday mornings. After all, most of the emphasis in leadership circles was based on “making your Sunday Service better.” The seekers and visitors didn’t care for our services because they quickly deduced that our services didn’t care for them. We were too excited that our question of getting bigger numbers was answered, but they needed us to answer the questions plaguing them.
A few decades down the road, has much changed? The further we get from the principles of Acts, the more our thought leaders attempt to postulate original ideas like Mars Hill philosophers, pitching profound-sounding theories about life and culture as the reason we’re missing the mark, while the church continues to shrink. In an attempt to reverse the downward trend, savvy authors have watered down and undermined Scripture, imagining it will make us look more attractive to the unreached. We could learn a little from history here. The religious leaders in Britain also pandered a more liberal brand of Christianity after World War II, unintentionally emptying the churches in the process. Their approach backfired, and we’re witnessing a repeat of history here in America. Once again, the church is out of answers and out of touch. Many Christians are so insulated in their ecclesiastical bubble that they’re unaware the world around them moved on ages ago and no longer cares what they’re saying. Besides, churches are still born out of a desire to draw a crowd, but the future belongs not to churches that can a draw crowd, but churches that can penetrate one.
Combining Jesus’s mission mandates in the Great Commission and Acts 1:8, we find the promise that he’ll accompany his church to the ends of the earth, until the end of the age. If Jesus promises to ride shotgun, we’d better let him call dibs. Otherwise, we’re the spiritual equivalent of somebody who doesn’t understand broadband technology and is still hunting for a faster dial-up modem. My friend, you’ve got mail. It’s the same mail that the Spirit served up to the seven churches of Asia; it’s a return to the Christ Himself as the only answer. Tozer said, “The world is perishing for lack of the knowledge of God and the Church is famishing for want of His presence.”13 Besides, the apostles discovered spiritual fiber optics two millennia ago.
The verdict: like the Pharisees, we postulate about the future, but can’t discern our own times. In my opinion, the only futurists worth listening to connect the past to the present, and return us to the principles God laid down in the pages of Acts. Lewis himself said, “No man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”14 You can’t get more original than Peter, Paul, and Jesus. Despite the fact that we ignore the power of God that Jesus promised to the church on mission, it’s still available. Acts remains the constant source of tried and true, timeless principles that show us how to reach the unreached in every culture, in every age, for every generation.
The Great Commission is a perpetual gauntlet that Jesus has thrown down to his church in every age. But he’s not waiting to see what we can do. He’s waiting for us to discover what he can do through us. If we’ll trust him. The Book of Acts is a demonstration of what he can do against odds stacked up worse than what faces us today. Besides, it’s not the odds that matter, but how we attempt to overcome them.
JUST DO IT
Still with me? I’m sure that hurt a little bit. Don’t worry, I took a few hits myself there, but Jesus spars with those he loves. We love the church, right? She’s been knocked out before, but she’s still his Million Dollar Baby! She’s going to win, but we want her to win this round! No matter how bad it looks, she’s still the champ, and this fight isn’t over yet. So after going a few rounds, I owe you some pep-talk-in-the-corner-time.
If the book of Acts were a video game, the spiritual equivalent of Space Invaders, the apostles topped the leader scoreboard in reaching the unreached. Their victory of the game owing to a combo move that pressed two buttons simultaneously—ceaseless action and prayerful dependence. Luke’s narrative of a world set on fire by the apostles begins in Acts 1 as they prayed for the evangelistic power they knew they didn’t have, but desperately needed. Acts chapter two was the result of possessing it. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit in answer to their powerlessness and dependency resulted in explosive action. It was a polar contrast to the inactivity and self-sufficiency that plagued the seven churches of Asia.
The apostles didn’t sit in the upper room endlessly debating about missiology. And sitting around talking isn’t going to change things for us either.* Like the apostles, we will have to get our feet moving and our hands dirty. When the seven churches of Asia were flat on their backs, Jesus gave each church its own unique action plan. Let’s examine Jesus’s action plan for the first church in Ephesus and apply it to our condition in the twenty-first century and see what happens.
To the church at Ephesus he said, “Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first” (Rev. 2:5 ESV). Boil that down and you’ve got Remember, Repent, and Return.
Remember from Where You’ve Fallen
Daredevil stunt motorcyclist Evel Knievel said, “Anyone can jump a motorcycle. The trouble comes when you try to land it.”15 When I was young, I slipped off a ledge while rock climbing, and slid, fell, and thudded back to earth. I was missing the skin off the back of my legs, had a suspected arm fracture, and a punctured side resulting from the rock waiting to catch me at the bottom. The severity of the pain at the end of every fall is measured by the height you fell from. For Ephesus, it fell from the heights recorded by Luke in Acts 19, an outbreak of revival. Luke chronicles Paul’s riot-inducing evangelism, Aquila and Priscilla’s church-planting skills, Apollos preaching the gospel, Paul baptizing a fresh wave of believers with the Holy Spirit, a massive book burning, the establishing of a church-planting hub, and other things worthy of temple-raiding adventurers (Acts 19:9–10). Not to mention that Timothy, Mary, and the Apostle John all lived in Ephesus for a time. That’s a long way to fall! Take heart. Jesus urges us to remember when we were raiding temples instead of bowing to idols. Take a minute and remember how it used to be when you were the most intimate with Jesus. Get it. Got it? Good!
Repent
Here’s the good news: the distance you’ve fallen doesn’t equate to the road back. Jesus has traveled that distance for you. All you need to do is turn around.
Using the R word may make the other kids at church think you smell, but Jesus uses it copiously. He used it twice in the letters to the seven churches, first with the Ephesians, and then with the Laodiceans. In this context, repentance means to return. Turn around. For the Ephesians, turning around meant looking back to that place in Acts where they were full of revival power and efficiency, turning their city upside down, seeing lives changed from the inside out. For you and me, it will be a look back that returns us to the newness of our faith, when we were wholly consumed with worshipping Jesus and were his witnesses instead of our own. It’s looking back to a time when others held you back from mission, rather than needing to urge you on. That look back ensures you don’t waste a good butt-kicking and all of this pain turns to gain, to ensure that you get back there again.
Return to the First Works
What were your first works? The things you did when knowing Jesus was brand new? Every reader’s experience of that series of new beginnings is different, but Jesus tells us to return to doing what we used to do. Remember it was called the book of Acts, not the book of Thoughts. Jesus called the Ephesians to action, knowing that a return to the first works will stir up something within us. And if you’ll heed the same call, it’ll be a return to not caring about what others think. It’s a return to the thrill of realizing God can use your frail, flawed, and broken life. It’s a return to a time when you were convinced that if you simply told somebody the truth—like letting the genie out of the bottle—their wildest wishes for love, absolution, and redemption would come true. Perhaps you were tapping the power back then. Real power. Because the Holy Spirit had found a willing partner. Or better yet, perhaps your deepest experience with God’s power on mission still awaits you.
Discussion Questions
(For Dr. Jones, the Princeton professor in you)
1. What do you think Jesus would say to the church today if he wrote it a letter?
2. What would you like to see happening today that you have read about in Acts?
3. Describe what you used to do when you felt you were at the greatest height of your Christian experience that you don’t do now.
4. What action steps could you take to return to the “first works” from that time?
5. What specific things come to mind when you think of the first works of the apostles?
Adventurous Actions
(For Indiana, the Temple Raider in you)
1. Make a list of things that you did when you were first saved and put them into practice this week. Be prepared to report on it next week.
2. D. L. Moody made a promise that he would tell somebody about Jesus every day for the rest of his life (he had to jump out of bed many times). Make that commitment this week alone and journal about the difference it makes.
3. Go on a date with God this week. (Get alone, go to a secluded spot, pray, read scripture, journal, take communion, and worship. Heck, maybe even fast for a day.) Return to the first works.
*A word of warning however: If you can’t handle a little loving fisticuffs from Jesus, you need a different scene. I would suggest something less radical than Christianity. You’d probably like religion. There are rules you can follow to make you feel really good about yourself. Personally, I’ve got a hunger for what’s found in the pages of the book of Acts. That book has created a hunger in me since I was first saved, and I don’t want to settle for anything less than the real deal.
*If the apostles had just sat in the upper room having endless debates about theology, we’d have a ready excuse.