CHAPTER 6
YOU WILL BE MY WITNESSES
Your gifts are designed to reach the world for Jesus. So what’s holding you back?
You will be my witnesses.
JESUS (ACTS 1:8)
Yes, you’re a man of many talents.
MUSGROVE TO INDIANA JONES
When I was converted to Christianity, I waited as the phone rang. My best friend picked up on the other end.
“What’s up, man?”
“Nothing. Just playing a video game.”
“Cool. I gotta tell you about something cool, but don’t laugh.”
“I can’t promise.”
“Well, you’re not going to expect this, and you’re probably going to think I’m joking, but I’m being dead serious.”
“Shoot.”
“I’m a Christian.”
(silence)
“You want to hear about it?”
“Um . . . yeah.”
“Okay, check it out. Jesus loves us, man. He died for us. He wants to forgive us for all the crap we’ve done. Man, he watches us while we sleep, he’s got the hairs on our heads numbered. He loves us so much that he’d do anything to have us get to know him. If we don’t accept his friendship, we stay his enemies, and when he comes back to judge the earth, we’re screwed, man. I became a Christian the other day and there’s nothing like it, man. You need to let me come over right now, and I’ll tell you more.”
“Okay.”
“Well, what do you think? Think you wanna become a Christian too?”
“Okay.”
“Cool, man, I’ll be right over to show you how to pray it right.”
My first and easiest convert ever! Over the phone even! I can remember thinking, Man, this Christianity stuff is going to be easy.
Little did I know. In fact, I pretty much knew nothing about anything.
But there was one thing I did know.
God used me.
And that was all I needed. I was hooked.
Looking back now, I realize the Holy Spirit used me when I knew next to nada, had zero skill in sharing the gospel, and didn’t even know the definition of the word “ministry.” God was real to me, and because the Holy Spirit was real in me, he was busting loose through my fumbling attempts to do the simplest of things for him. Without knowing I had “gifts,” I was using them. I’d subconsciously become his witness despite myself. When people are released in their gifts, Jesus becomes unleashed on the world.
As the Spirit channeled through the disciples, he expressed himself through spiritual gifts. Ephesians chapter four says that when Jesus left the world, there was a Jesus-shaped-hole in it. That might seem like Jesus took a few steps backward in kingdom expansion, but his plan to “fill all things” was by distributing spiritual gifts to mankind (Eph. 4:7–13). As the body grows and matures, it expands, in turn filling that Jesus-shaped hole. The body grows as “each part does its work” (Eph. 4:16). Jesus replaces his life on earth through our lives, as the gifts flourish. Jesus’s work on the cross may be finished, but his ministry in the world is not. He continues his ministry through the powerful outworking of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, in a way that’s unique to you. Peter preached, but you may never speak a sermon. And that’s okay if that’s not your calling. Nobody can crack that whip like Indiana Jones, and nobody can use your gifts just like you. Indy’s fedora was shaped to his head, and nobody will be the Indiana Jones that Harrison Ford is. Your gifts are as uniquely tailored to you as that fedora. Indy was kitted out with a leather jacket, revolver, map, and a bag of sand, but you’ve got your own necessary tools to accomplish your mission.
TIME TO GET WET
We’ve been expecting our church services to be the witnesses when we were told that we ourselves would be his witnesses. For decades the church bombarded the enemy with powerful mortars, like a massive battleship, while we safely stood on the deck behind the armored plating, swabbing the decks, and doing other church chores. That worked great in the eighties, but in case you haven’t heard, the eighties were over a quarter of a century ago. Those days are done. That’s why those battle tactics won’t work anymore, and it’s time to regroup.
Reaching the unreached in the years to come will require people to infiltrate communities like Navy SEAL teams. Our military brass entrusts some of our most critical missions to SEAL teams because they can perform extractions where naval battleships fail. In the case of reaching the unreached the splinter cell approach is the right tool for the job. The average believer can infiltrate enemy territory throughout the week with the stealth of an airborne ranger, duck-dive over the railings, and plunge into the deep. If immersion into hostile waters is an occupational requirement of being a Navy SEAL, we’ve been unable to accomplish the mission because we’ve been afraid to get our feet wet. Just being you, filled with Christ, will bring you many more conversations and experiences to proclaim Christ than seeking out a “mission.”
Stories have piled up about communities changed by small unassuming everyday believers discovering new and innovative ways of connecting with individuals as they blunder into mission. Big doors turn on small hinges. Tugboats turn tankers. Splinter cells can win wars. We’re in a different kind of battle, where individual guerilla tactics make you a fast moving, light-footed, low to the ground reconnaissance weapon of witness. You won’t be effective in big numbers in the future. You won’t need the heavy artillery. You’re perfect for the job in a way that your church never will be. No matter what we do, no matter how many programs we launch, stadiums we fill, or outreaches we put on, statistics from Lifeway Research tell us that sixty percent of the unchurched American populace will never come to church. Period. It’s up to you. There is no cavalry riding over the hill, no big guns, no backup ground support, no rescue team coming.
Just you.
Don’t underestimate your size, or undervalue yourself because you can’t operate with the sound and fury of a big church. It’s a myth to think that megachurches are God’s big guns. God has always operated in small numbers, scored with the underdog, and favored the dark horse. “Judge me by my size do you?” Yoda asked Luke Skywalker. And when push came to shove against Count Dooku, Yoda proved more dangerous than a midget on fire. That works for my short man syndrome, on both a physical and spiritual level. You probably didn’t even realize that to join the Special Forces of the American military you only have to be four foot ten.* Without drifting into the Napoleonic monologue from Time Bandits, about how all the world conquerors were “tiny guys,” I’ll just say big things come in small packages. Mother Theresa was a tiny woman who made a huge impact in her world. Armed with the gift of compassion, she was willing to strike out on her own, leave the walls of the convent in Calcutta, and care for the poor and dying in the streets of India, and became more inspirational to the world than the entire Roman Catholic Machine in Rome. Similarly, when Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s cabin, he exclaimed, “So this is the little woman who started the big war.” Your life could be a small meteor that leaves a huge impact crater because it has the force of heaven behind it. C. S. Lewis was hinting at the uniqueness of every human being and their capacity for eternal significance when he said, “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.”1
The powerhouse potential of each believer is squandered when our churches value one person’s gift on the big stage, while an entire room of unused gifts come to listen. In the system of “one large gift to rule them all,” believers are seen as small cogs in the big wheel, doing church chores, giving time, money, and energy to keep the machine going. Instead of being quick, punchy, risky, and powerful, we become tame, housebound safety officers. The systematization of religion fosters the illusion that “you need us to do mission work for you. Bring people here. We’ll save them.” In the beginning of the church, it was not so. Jesus didn’t set the church up this way according to Ephesians 4:11. The speaking gifts of apostle, prophet, evangelist, shepherd, and teacher have their place, but their role is to equip the body for the work of the ministry.
The gifts of the Holy Spirit were given to the church, but like an old tie or wool knit sweater from grandma, they can remain folded and unused in the bottom of the drawer. When your gifts aren’t needed in church, they lay there dormant, or you begin to find other outlets for them outside of church, using them unawares. God still moves through you, but because you’re not in touch with them, you may not recognize that it’s him. But others do. They’re going away wondering why you’re so different. Business experts talk about the unconscious competent, but you’re the unconscious witness to Jesus.
Perhaps the largest travesty among church goers is that many are unaware they even have spiritual gifts. One of the most powerful evangelists of the nineteenth century, Dwight L. Moody said, “For years, I really believed that I could not work for God. No one had ever asked me to do anything.”
Read the open invitation to allow the Holy Spirit to make you his witness: “But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift” (Eph. 4:7, emphasis mine). You won’t easily identify your gifts by asking what you’ve been allowed to do up until now. You find your gifts by noting what thrills you every time a particular gift is mentioned. This is because a person’s gifts aren’t too far removed from their passions. The gifts of helps, compassion, and giving are often unwittingly acted out when a believer is constantly helping people who can’t help themselves. People with these gifts find themselves giving money, time, or services (like fixing a car) without fully understanding that Christ is expressing his heart through them. The unchurched recipients scratch their heads and wonder why you’ve spent so much time helping them, as you become a living epistle, preaching God’s undeserved grace and favor to them in tangible, practical ways. In silent moments, when their guard is down, for a brief moment they catch a glimpse of Jesus, as you do the things that Jesus does. You’ve just unwittingly become his witness by being who God made you to be: Jesus wearing a “you” costume. Never underestimate the spiritual connection that a simple act can make to a person’s soul. Men have married women for simply baking them cookies, for the proverb is true that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. The way to a person’s soul may be through fixing their car. And although this can happen through you while you’re completely unaware of it, it does not make it any less real. When a believer becomes aware of it, they simply become more strategic in how they implement and deploy their gifts to God’s glory.
IF YOU MISSED THE CONCERT, YOU CAN STILL WEAR THE T-SHIRT
Despite what you may have been led to believe, the church services you attend are not the key to reaching the unreached. You are. God desperately wants to reveal to you what he can accomplish in the world through you. We rob ourselves when we hand the adventure map and temple raiding over to the pastor, church, or program. We assume the gifts belong in the church service, but at Pentecost, we see the gifts effectively utilized outside the four walls of that room. I interviewed an underground missionary so cool, he has a secret identity like Superman. Knowing that he was on the front lines of mission, I asked him what gifts were operating from the book of Acts. He shifted uncomfortably, leaned in, and asked, “Is this on the record or off?” I assured him it was off the record. Unsure that I’d believe him, in a hushed whisper he said, “Bro, we’re seeing the dead raised.” He was a Baptist, and they aren’t allowed to talk crazy talk.
When the Spirit fell at Pentecost, the apostles became witnesses by taking their gifts to the street. As a one-time request only, the apostles played an international set list of “tongues” so unique it was never repeated. It was a one-time concert, like the time U2 played the impromptu concert on the roof of the downtown Los Angeles liquor store in 1987, immortalized in the video for “Where the Streets Have No Name.” You were either there and got to see it, or you heard stories about it later. It still kills me that I lived down the road when it happened, and didn’t know it was going on. You may not have been in downtown Los Angeles when the cops shut down Bono and the band on the rooftop on that historic day, but the T-shirt is still available online. You may have missed the show two thousand years ago when Peter rocked the mic at the one time epic international Pentecost show, but you can still wear your own T-shirt and be a witness to the world of what Jesus has done. Incidentally, T-shirts are one of the best ways of advertising things because it transforms you into a walking, talking billboard. You may not have been present at Pentecost, but you can still be an indirect witness to the epic nature of the concert today by utilizing your spiritual gifts.
The beauty of Acts 1:8 is that it’s about what would happen once the crowds dispersed. Jesus promised we would be his witnesses, rocking to the end of the earth, to the end of the age. That means the offer still stands today, and he’s still got a T-shirt in your size. He’s still got gifts tailored to your personal calling. When you use your gifts, it’s like putting on a U2 concert shirt that makes people wish they could be there and hear the music. You’ve just glorified God without even trying.
When the Holy Spirit fell, the crowd was reacting to the gift of international tongues, a one-time stadium filler, but Peter told the people that being witnesses isn’t just for rock star apostles. He said,
In the last days, God says,
I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
your young men will see visions,
your old men will dream dreams.
Even on my servants, both men and women,
I will pour out my Spirit in those days,
and they will prophesy.
ACTS 2:17–18
Peter was quoting the prophet Joel, who prophesied that the Lord would pour his Spirit out on “all flesh,” including sons and daughters, wrinkly old men, and prune-skinned women. They’d dream dreams, prophecy, and experience visions. Everyone was a participant. Pentecost was an all-inclusive, crowd-swelling revolution that opened ministry up to everyone. Nobody was excluded according to Joel’s prophecy. You weren’t too old, too young, too male or too female, too poor, or too enslaved. Anyone could be God’s witnesses. Zoom in close, and you can see yourself waving in the satellite picture of that verse because Peter is explaining that Joel’s prophecy is also talking about you, “And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call” (Acts 2:38–39).
Paul Pastor wrote, “ ‘I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh,’ God said. He was addressing a culture that understood the work of God among humanity as mediated work—to the people through a prophet, a priest, a king. Poured out on all? This was a new thing.”2 Let this bullet sink into your brain a bit and it will end your life as you knew it. In order to accomplish the mission, God gave you a unique set of gifts that are strategically meant to fill a you-shaped hole, as the body of Christ collectively fills the Jesus-shaped hole left in the world after his ascension!
I AM EVERYDAY PEOPLE
At Pentecost, Jesus was going global and everybody was supposed to be in on the ground level. The most rapid kingdom expansion movements around the globe are happening through ordinary people empowered in their gifts. Throughout church history, epochs of reformation and revival have resulted in God energizing the men and women, old and young, whether cause or effect, no one knows. Nonetheless, they go together like Forest and Jenny, peas and carrots. From the releasing of Scripture into the hands of the commoner during the Reformation to the ordaining lay preachers and setting up home-based experience meetings during the Great Awakening, God has been pouring his Spirit out on everyday people.
William Booth gathered misfits, rejects, ex-cons, and alcoholics and God dredged the gutters of Victorian Britain. Count Zinzendorf opened his estate to pauper gypsies, and the Moravians became the largest missionary movement the world had ever seen up to that point. During the Evangelical Awakening, Wesley ordained lay preachers, launched circuit riders, and trained them to recruit people who could disciple small groups known as “experience meetings” or “societies.” The societies were strategically placed to empower, equip, and release everyday believers after the field preachers blew out of town. That groundswell was the strength of the movement, and without them, there’d have been no Great Awakening. The civil rights movement found a voice in leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks, but it was the Freedom Riders who made it a movement.
Throughout church history, pew sitters have turned gospel jockeys and the trajectory of kingdom growth has skyrocketed as a result. Following suit, the solution for the church’s plight will come from an activation of the pew sitters, not a mandate from the pulpit. When the gifts in the people are activated and unleashed, the church becomes God’s witnesses in power.
Jesus handpicked a small band of twelve that nobody else had time for, and used them to turn the world upside down. He empowered the woman at the well to preach the gospel, resulting in an entire village taking a second look at Jesus. Few would have placed value in that woman’s life. Not a single person Jesus chose was clergy material. Unless we value the individual believer as more potent than a program, we’re not going to be effective.
Tozer said:
We would do well to seek a new appreciation of the inarticulate many who make up the body of the church. They do a large share of the praying and pay most of the bills. Without them not a preacher could carry on, not a Bible school function. They are the flesh and sinews of the missionary program. They are the private soldiers of the Lord who do most of the fighting and get fewest decorations. The big stars of the Church get a lot of their glory now; the plain Christians must wait until the Lord returns. There will be some surprises then.3
FIRST-CENTURY STYLE LEADERSHIP
The apostles had to learn to encourage and disciple ordinary, everyday believers in their gifts because as church planters, the apostles didn’t stick around too long. Some think the apostles merely evangelized, and then got the heck outta Dodge. But Paul laid a foundation by reproducing himself so others could build on it, continuing forward momentum once he’d blown the popsicle stand. Paul told Timothy how to develop and empower everyday disciples, “Entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others” (2 Tim. 2:2). Look at that verse a little closer. Do you realize that there is discipleship development going four levels deep packed into that small verse? Everyday believers are a part of it, and if you look closely, you’ll see yourself hiding in that verse, no matter what you do in church.
Here are the four levels of discipleship in that verse:
▪ Paul—penning the instruction to the guy he’s discipled, Timothy
▪ Timothy—being taught to pass the gospel down to reliable people he can disciple or “entrust” it to
▪ Reliable people—who are able to train and disciple others
▪ Others—everyday ordinary believers living out their calling
The “others” would eventually become disciplers as they were discipled. How do I know this? Because after launching a number of churches out of our urban Long Beach church plant, we could do nothing else. We trained up our first string candidates, the “Timothys,” and sent them out to plant. Our second stringers, or “reliable people,” needed more time practicing, or incubating. I poured into them and tied them off like a water balloon and launched them. Finally, I looked around at my third stringers, “the others,” and sent them out too. By the fourth church plant, I’d run out of candidates for ministry and just started looking for warm bodies. That’s what happens when the coach looks into the bleachers for replacements. Our spectator stands were full of fence salesmen, financial planners, and DJs. When you run out of traditional leaders, you’re forced to disciple people who would never go into “vocational ministry” and leave their day jobs. I quickly discovered, however, that anybody I discipled became leadership material. Rather than waiting for people to emerge as leaders, I started producing my own. This radically changed my theory and paradigm of leadership development. Whereas I used to look for the young people who seemed eager to preach or take the conventional ministry path, I now disciple whoever is immediately in front of me. I learned that everybody has gifts and that discipleship pulls those gifts out of people faster than anything else. It dawned on me recently that the main reason I may have been in leadership younger than most people is because, from day one, I had people discipling me nonstop. D. L. Moody said, “If this world is going to be reached, I am convinced that it must be done by men and women of average talent.”4 I’ve been witnessing it in action.
The fact that God uses ordinary people shouldn’t come as a surprise as we look at the model of the early church. The model of the New Testament is not to leave it to the professionals, but to get the professionals to leave. The early church sent out their best: Paul, Peter, and John. Only James stays behind in Jerusalem. Take Paul himself. Paul had nearly reached the pinnacle of organized pharisaical ministry prior to his conversion. After losing it all, he called it a butt-load of crap saying it had cost him more than it was worth (Phil. 3:8). He became the most effective tool for the gospel after he’d “left the ministry” and gone back to the family business of making tents. I sometimes wonder if Jesus called Paul simply to show he could use ministers to do something useful after all, because his first choice was ordinary people like fishermen, government employees, and anti-establishment punk rock zealots, like the rest of us. Jesus himself was a carpenter fully surrendered to God. Spirit-empowered construction workers for the win! The most powerful ministry I’ve ever done was after I’d left the ministry and worked as a firefighter, factory worker, or barista. I’ve learned that there aren’t any magic powers that are given to ordained people. Far from it. If I really want to be effective at reaching the unreached, you’ll see me working a day job somewhere in Everywhere, USA. At the time of writing this, I’m currently working for a large mission board, training church planting trainers. My team leader is a great friend named Mac Lake who checks up on me to see if I’m okay because he knows I yearn to be surrounded by lost people again. Although I have the most amazing job on the planet, training the next generation of church planting trainers, I confessed that I’d recently put out an application for a senior writer at a major video game company, simply because of my apostolic bent. A combat soldier in the Asian Theater during World War II radioed in his position, “We’ve got the enemy to the North of our position, to the South, East, and the West . . . and I’m pretty sure they’re not getting away from us this time, sir.” Similarly, my gifts become fully activated when I’m fully surrounded by the unchurched. Park me in a room full of people who don’t know Jesus and my gifts are activated and unleashed. I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.
PRODIGALS, NOMADS, AND EXILES
Like-minded millennials are the future of North American mission. A few years ago, I spoke with my brother-in-law who leads the mission program at a Christian university. He told me the kids coming through gunning for ministry are no longer studying theology, but business or global economics. They are going to give their lives to serving God with everything they have. They just aren’t going to be doing it in a church building. And it’s not just the ministry that they’ve left. Often it’s the church itself.
David Kinnaman, in his book You Lost Me, tells us that there are currently three categories of people who’ve left the church: prodigals, nomads, and exiles.
▪ Prodigals don’t believe anymore, so church doesn’t make sense.
▪ Nomads still believe, but left church because it still doesn’t make sense.
▪ Exiles believe so strongly, that they’ve given their lives to mission and can no longer find an outlet in churches because they don’t make sense to the leadership.
Put simply, the exiles found their way into mission without us, and believe too strongly in it to just attend a show on a Sunday morning. They’ve left the established church as outward-bound missionaries because they were too dedicated to the mission of Jesus to be held back by our insular ways. In the public sector, they’re running missions, and they feel alive as God is moving through them. They’re functioning as a missionary station in Nepal or a small medical clinic in Africa, but on home soil in cubicles, collaborative spaces, and through relationships. A small band, low to the ground, and effective. They’ve followed the currents of traffic in the marketplace, and constantly share Jesus with people through their lives and conversation. They are tomorrow’s gospel activists who just couldn’t sit in church anymore and think that was the big event of their spiritual week.
What I’m saying is not popular, but necessary. Having been a firefighter, I’m no stranger to doing unpopular things to save people’s lives. I’ve debrided MRSA wounds that exposed skin layers, fat, muscle, and bone. I’ve inserted nasal gastric tubes into paralyzed people while their eyes confessed the agony it was causing, begging me to stop. I’ve held family members back from rushing into a burning house where the kids were confirmed deceased; rushing in meant certain and unnecessary death. I’ve had to do and say a lot of things over the past few years that weren’t pleasant, but I believed they were right and necessary. I realize this isn’t easy to hear, but what if the exiles are right?
They didn’t want to be like the sportscasters commenting on the game, viewed as experts, talking about plays. They wanted to get back into the game, feel the crunch of the shoulder pads and crack of a helmet making contact. They wanted to sweat, and risk, and win. So they’re outside the church walls doing what those inside are talking about doing.
CHECKED AT THE DOOR
Our lack of action within the walls of the church is due to how we’ve set church up to run like a spectator sport instead of a contact sport. We invite people to a Sunday set up, treat those in attendance like an audience, then spend the entire sermon pleading with them to be active participants when they leave. They sit there and listen, but we don’t provide them with any model or means of carrying out the mission. We assume they’ll make it up when they leave us. It’s about as successful as the dentist asking people to floss every day once they leave the dentist’s office. Um . . . yeah.
My approach as a church leader changed after I accidentally planted a church in Europe. My wife and I stumbled into running a book club in the local Starbucks, intending to discuss The Da Vinci Code for a “one night only” event, but then it became a church after unchurched people asked us to do it every week. We set up chairs in a horseshoe pattern around coffee tables that allowed everybody to interact with each other. This was how Paul “reasoned” with people (Acts 17:2, 17; 18:4) in an interactive style of discussion called synagogue-style evangelism. It was powerful. Everybody sitting in that small group inadvertently became an evangelist, and every visiting unbeliever could ask questions, answer, or just listen. Ezra employed an interactive method when he read the law to the gathered multitude in Jerusalem. His scribes moved throughout the crowd and met with clumps of people, fielding questions and entering into discussions “giving the meaning” of what was read (Neh. 8:8). We found that people’s gifts were best activated in circles, not in rows. Suddenly, people were evangelizing, encouraging each other, prophesying without realizing it, serving, and praying with one another. We provided people with an opportunity to interact. We gave the gifts a chance. That environment was like giving birth underwater, and the new believers born to us there naturally knew how to swim and hold their breath. All I had to do was get out of the way, as their gifts naturally emerged in the right atmosphere. Once you’ve tasted interactive spiritual outreach gatherings, you can’t go back to church as you knew it.
In most churches, the worship “sets” run like well-oiled machines leaving no margin to use the gifts of the people. Watertight services are so perfectly choreographed that there’s hardly a crack for the gifts to slip in. Spiritual gifts get checked at the door. Could the Holy Spirit be as much a spectator as the people sitting in the pews, watching the leaders do everything? Or if the gifts are the channel for the Holy Spirit to glorify Jesus, has he been checked at the door along with the gifts? “I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door . . .” (Rev. 3:20). When you refuse to allow the people to participate, you block one of the ports of entry where the Holy Spirit often breaks in. Whereas when you let people participate, the Spirit begins to flow through the gifts and ushers in a sense of the presence of Christ. When the gifts are exercised, an opening is created, as if by a linebacker, so that the Holy Spirit runs the football through to make a touchdown, and scores the winning connection with his people. If people are the running backs, their spiritual gifts are the power plays.
Because spiritual gifts are expressions of God’s presence among his people, they change the atmosphere of the entire room. Paul said when the nonbeliever came into the gatherings of the Corinthian church, it was possible for them to experience a Jacob-style awareness that God was in their midst. The use of the gift of prophecy would allow God to speak in a way that “the secrets of his heart are disclosed, and so, falling on his face, he will worship God and declare that God is really among you” (1 Cor. 14:25 ESV, emphasis mine). In other words, the unbeliever experiences what he doesn’t believe in: the presence of God, through the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Of course, if that happened in one of our Sunday services, we’d probably apologize for making him uncomfortable and give him a coupon for coffee in the foyer to ensure he returns the following week.
Paul places the gifts in the category of a witness to the gospel, rather than entertainment for Christians. Thankfully Paul laid down ground rules that hedged decency and order, and he told the Corinthians to stop driving lost people away with all kinds of crazy. Their false beliefs about the gifts and their tendency to hype them up were actually obscuring God’s true presence as much as somebody who quenched the Spirit by not allowing him in at all. Paul told them they were sacrificing the most powerful opportunity believers have to experience God’s presence. The gifts amplify his presence, especially for witness to the unchurched. When believers exercise their gifts, it changes the atmosphere, making everyone aware of the supernatural aspect of Christianity, but therein lies the rub. Somehow we’ve reduced Jesus’s mandate to spread the Greatest Story Ever Told, to running the Greatest Show on Earth.
YA FEEL ME?
The presence of God is the one thing that can’t be successfully duplicated or manufactured. It can, however, be substituted with something else. A Pentecostal church leader once confided to me, “The weakness of our movement is that we aren’t comfortable when God isn’t moving so we tend to whip it up, rather than falling on our knees, patiently waiting on him, and asking the right questions.” When the king of Egypt raided the treasures of Rehoboam’s palace and plundered the gold shields Solomon had made, Rehoboam tried to keep up appearances by replacing them with shields of bronze to mask the shame of defeat. E. M. Bounds observed, “All around us we see a tendency to substitute human gifts and worldly attainments for that supernatural, inward power which comes from on high in answer to prayer.”5
On the front lines of mission, bereft of church trappings, I’ve had “take your shoes off” moments as I stood on holy ground and felt the overwhelming presence of God. Have you ever been in a room where the felt presence of God was so overwhelming that everyone sensed him? I’ve been in prayer meetings where it seemed a mere forty-five minutes had elapsed, but when we all glanced at our watches, we were shocked it had been five hours! That only happened once, but happened it did. Blown away, we were. Talking like Yoda unnecessarily, I am.
I can remember a baptism in an old Welsh chapel where the presence of God was so thick in the room you could cut it with a knife. As I stood wading in the water of the baptistry, God seemed to fill the room in a way that was tangible. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been afraid of the manifestation of God’s presence and my hands began to tremble. That night we baptized a notorious heroin addict who, before coming to Christ, had previously slit his throat in the entrance of a supermarket. Another woman was baptized and her two construction worker brothers felt God’s presence and were saved on the spot and set free from addiction. We baptized a college student who had invited his friends and a couple of them also came to faith that night. I glanced into the eyes of the nonbelievers from the water, wondering if they could sense his presence. Yep. Their eyes were wide with fear. The litmus test of whether God is moving isn’t how many Christians you’ve crammed into a room, but the effect upon the lost. The “Big G” was in the house, and it was evident to all.
Drew Dyck writes, “God is always present, I believe. But he doesn’t always manifest his presence in the same way. The remarkable thing about these experiences is that they seem to take me by surprise. In those services in which I have sensed his presence, it wasn’t because the music was particularly good or the prayers particularly profound. It was because there was a collective sense of God’s power and glory, of his holiness. I recall standing in a room with three hundred people singing ‘How Great Is Our God’ and it felt like we were blending into heaven.”
When the Organized Atheist Church in the UK can replicate an average Christian service, and without any noticeable difference, it’s time for the Church of Christ to take a pulse. If all it takes is songs and inspirational talks to mimic us, then we’ve lost the vital felt presence and demonstrable power of God in our midst. Yet Paul boasted, “Our gospel came to you not simply with words but also with power, with the Holy Spirit” (1 Thess. 1:5). Can our churches boast the same?
How would you know that God was in your midst?
Conversely, how would you know that God was not in your midst?
You would have to know what the presence of God felt like to know how to answer both questions, but our churches don’t seem to put stock in the “felt presence” of Christ.
When I was serving as the evangelist in Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s legendary church, Sandfields, where the Spirit had powerfully moved in the 1930s, the elders would huddle in prayer before the service kicked off. Assured that Jesus had promised to be present when two or more gathered, they still yearned for more. They consistently prayed that his “felt presence” would be among them. The waves of revival that Wales had experienced had left an indelible mark on how they prayed. They expected God to turn up, and if he didn’t, they begged for him to do so the following Sunday. As I reflected on what they meant in praying this way, my mind went back to all the times that God promised to be in the midst of his people.
God has a habit of crashing the party. Isaiah ministered faithfully in a business-as-usual manner as priest and prophet, but one day, God tore through the rafters of the temple and the hem of God’s garment wrecked Isaiah’s world. Moses was hidden in the cleft of the rock and could barely absorb the after burn of God’s glory. A frustrated, obedient “Holy Club” devotee George Whitefield threw himself on his bed at Christ’s College in Oxford and cried out, “I thirst!” and as the Spirit fell upon him, the evangelical world irreversibly shifted. God interrupted. God broke in. What if God wanted to break in on us?
We haven’t left him any room.
In the same way that God’s presence can’t be manufactured or duplicated, it can’t be purchased or bought. It has to be sought. We have plenty of money, but a lack of power. But in order to experience New Testament power, you need New Testament prayer. Jesus found that making church a house of prayer, rather than a circus of religious entertainment or a money-making scheme, upset the status quo too much and interfered too much with what the people were trying to accomplish. The local church won’t return to prayer anytime soon, for the same reason we’re not praying in the first place—we don’t think it will draw, hook, or keep a crowd. When a church is concerned with numbers, it’s usually doing things that eventually lead to decline, which is what the nineties taught us about the eighties. Unfortunately, many didn’t learn.
Maybe leaders are right. Maybe it would drive people away.
Praying might . . .
Get people involved, which might . . .
Cause them to interact with God, which might . . .
Expose their lack of spirituality, which might . . .
Make them feel uncomfortable, which might . . .
Make them leave . . .
And we can’t bear that.
Or it might truly transform the church.
It might even bring revival if you believe in that sort of thing.
The fact that many don’t, is telling in and of itself.
A pastor once confided to me that he felt most of what he did was smoke and mirrors, giving the crowd what they wanted so they would keep coming back. Anything to keep the crowds coming, even if it means God isn’t—at least not in a way that he can be experienced.
Thank God that prayer was all the early church had. It’s why they also had power.
OUTREACH SHOULD BE GIFT-DRIVEN
That power the early church had, like all energy, needed an outlet. Gifts were never really intended for internal use, but external. That’s why the power Jesus spoke of in Acts 1:8 is connected with mission. It’s why the apostles immediately went outside when they began to speak in missional tongues as a witness.* It’s also why Paul spoke of the gifts in 1 Corinthians in the context of unbelievers experiencing God through them. When the gifts get stuck within the church’s walls, they lack the outlet that they were intended for. The gifts were intended for what happens outside of the four walls of the church. The beauty of Acts 1:8 was that Pentecost was the catalytic event, but the process was intended to repeat in the epoch of every age until we’ve hit the ends of the earth. The ripple effects continued beyond the big meeting, and into the rest of the week, month, year, decade, century, down through the millennia, until today. We denude that power of being his witnesses when we imagine spiritual gifts are intended for Sundays. The gifts aren’t something we do for an hour every Sunday, they’re an integral part of who we are. Os Guinness said, “The truth is not that God is finding us a place for our gifts but that God has created us and our gifts for a place of his choosing—and we will only be ourselves when we are finally there.”6 The gifts flow out of us on Sundays and the six days in between. If the gifts authentically operate inside the church walls, they will be outside as well because they were never intended to entertain believers. They were designed to serve as witnesses to Jesus’s glory.
The world’s needs are greater than any one congregation can meet. Nevertheless, the anonymous maxim applies here, “I can’t do everything, but I can do something, and I will not let everything I cannot do, keep me from doing the something that I’m called to do.” You can do something, or rather, God can do something through you, to reach the community around you.
When that happens, we call it gift-driven ministry. Business models operate with the idea that you can draw lines across a whiteboard, predicting what you’re going to be doing, and how you’re going to branch out in the next couple of years. That’s nifty when you’re flipping widgets, but not so good when you’re dealing with Holy-Spirit-filled believers. We plan outreach using concentric rings instead of lines. The first inner ring represents our church. The second represents the unreached in our community. Inside the first ring is our team symbolized by a bunch of dots. Each dot represents a person with unique gifts, and their gifts are represented by arrows going out from them, beyond the circle, representing our church. As people come to faith, we draw arrows to the dots once they are reached. Here’s where it gets fun. We draw a circle around the dots outside of the original circle redefining the “inner circle” representing the church to encompass them too. Now we have more dots. More dots means more arrows. More arrows equals more gifts. More gifts means more ways to be a witness in that community. Our chief concern becomes finding out what the arrows are, or the gifts that God has placed in our midst. Therefore, the question that anyone who wants to be effective in outreach has to ask is, “How has the Holy Spirit equipped the people in front of me, on my team, to reach this town?” It’s not what I want to do to reach my community that counts, it’s what the Holy Spirit has gifted the people in front of me to do.
If we’ve just reached three creatives, then we explore whether the Holy Spirit wants us to engage in creative outreach next. If we reach three bikers, then maybe we create space for people to do stuff tough guys like. If he brings us three single mothers, then we may start a mother’s support group. It could be three addicts coming to faith that triggers a recovery group. We never know who we’re going to reach ahead of time, but we have a pretty good clue where to start by following our gifts. All of these are relational and involve these people getting involved in their own communities with things they are already familiar with. They’re not following us into battle; it’s us accompanying them. They perceive us to be leading, but our leading looks a lot like following, as we empower them to reach their community in the unique way God has hotwired them to release their powerful witness. Then we release them to do things through the power of the Holy Spirit that they never dreamed possible and empower, equip, and support them in whatever way we can.
Last year, our Christmas outreach started with a toy drive to support a local women’s and children’s shelter through which we forged relationships. Through that process, we discovered more than physical needs, and although we hadn’t really seen a need for a women’s Bible study at our church, a women’s discipleship group began to take shape out of necessity. Our women were already being used for evangelizing, exhorting, and admonishing one another regularly, but witnessing the brokenness of the women from the shelter, we had a reason to start a discipleship group. The gifts of the disciplers and the gifts of the disciple were simultaneously awakened in the process.
A DOOR KEEPER IN THE HOUSE OF MY GOD
When I started my first church plant in Europe, I’d been in ministry for fourteen years, and a missionary for five. I was burned out. I’d actually quit ministry and was simply acting as “a doorkeeper in the house of my God,” holding the door for the Spirit to come out, and for the lost to come in. I told God that I quit. I was done working for him and if he wanted anything to come of the book club at Starbucks, he needed to do all the heavy lifting. I told the church-planting team I had a broad canvas, and a few brush strokes, but they needed to fill in the details. They didn’t know what I meant, so I told them I didn’t want to be in ministry anymore. I just wanted to be a normal guy. I was fed up trying to climb over grumpy Christians to reach the lost. I told this motley crew in my living room that I didn’t have a red Batphone to heaven that was ringing off the hook with calls from the commissioner. Plus, I didn’t want to be Batman. (Did I really just say that?) So we looked around the group and asked, “What gifts do we have here?” We couldn’t use a business model or five-year plan, but decided to use an organic model with no clue what we were doing. All we knew was that if the Holy Spirit was real, he’d lead us, move us, and reach the people through us that he was gunning for. Being a doorkeeper meant I got out of his way, but inadvertently, it also meant I’d stepped out of everybody else’s way, and given them room to do the work of the ministry.
We had people who liked films, so they started a film critic’s club. We used films like I Am Legend. That movie scared the pants off me, yet it was laced with signposts of redemption. The movie opens with a shot of an old poster on a brick wall, reading, “God has not abandoned us,” and ends with a guy sacrificing himself for humanity after screaming, “I can save you with the blood!” Weaving that conversation back around to Jesus in a film club discussion is easier than beating a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest. The only thing that would come easier is if a chariot pulled up in the middle of the desert and an Ethiopian asked you to explain Isaiah 53 to him (Acts 8:26–40)!
We had two professional chefs, so a group kicked off that taught single teen moms how to cook healthy foods because the mayor told us that if Jamie Oliver knew what they were eating, he’d have a heart attack. We had college students who were addicted to Halo; we started tournaments. Don’t laugh. More people got saved from that missional community than any of the others. They also got their butts kicked at Halo. Our guys were good. Our key to effective evangelism was allowing people to be who they really were. Really real. Be themselves. Once we started doing church like this, we started finding out ways that people could be used in their passions.
Jesus specifically placed the hand-picked combinations of gifts perfectly formatted to your calling. Everything about you can be harnessed and put to use for the Lord. Even your personality—for some people, that’s pretty redemptive! Shy people can be just as effective at welcoming new visitors to one of our gatherings, simply because they’re seen as good listeners, and not intimidating. It’s a big myth that loud people make the best evangelists.
Your passions matter. Your hobbies matter. Because how you’ve been wired matters for mission. We’ve been told for too long that hobbies are just idols that get in our way. But the Bible redeems hobbies for us. The temple artisans were made into ministerial craftsmen for a living, because their creative skills were outlets for revealing God’s glory. Your creativity or physical activity can also be a way of expressing who God made you to be. Eric Liddell always wanted to travel to Africa and be a missionary, but something in him beckoned him to compete athletically despite what others thought. When his sister urged him to drop it for the mission field, he replied “God made me fast. And when I run, I feel his pleasure.”
Time to get running.
Discussion Questions
(For Dr. Jones, the Princeton Professor in you)
1. What do you think your gifts are? What evidences have you seen of them?
2. Ask somebody else what they observe in your life.
3. Compare the lists of the gifts in Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12, knowing that neither is a complete list. Consider what gifts you may have. Do you have a gift that is not listed in either?
Adventurous Actions
(For Indiana, the Temple Raider in you)
1. Grab a newspaper and circle every need you find in your city
2. Circle the top two needs that you want to do something about.
3. The chances are that you’ve circled something that has to do with your gifts. The reason why is that your gifts are connected to what you’re passionate about.
4. Now join your community in creatively practicing that gift in mission, or start something with others in your community.
*Technically, four foot ten is classified as a little person. They used to say midgets, but that insults circus performers. You can’t say dwarf anymore either since Lord of the Rings. Dwarves carry axes now.
*This does appear to be unique from the other types of tongues mentioned in the Scripture.