CHAPTER 8
IN ALL JUDEA
God will take you to the very limits of your comfort zone.
You will be my witnesses . . . in all Judea.
JESUS (ACTS 1:8)
You know what a cautious fellow I am.
INDIANA JONES, SARCASTICALLY TO MARCUS
It’s not just getting accidentally beat up that I’m good at. I refuse to discriminate against any kinds of accidents, including ones that involve church planting. I like to think of myself as the accidental missionary. The public launch of Refuge Long Beach was a train wreck. The sun was just about to set the Friday evening before our launch, when the Batphone rang. It was the City of Long Beach. Apparently, our church plant’s launch day in the community center was now a national holiday that government employees took off because it fell on 9/11. In short, no employee could unlock the doors to the community center. Having a crisis forty-eight hours before the launch of a church plant is bad timing for mere mortals, but God has never run his life or mine by my clock. I decided taking a long walk around the block with him was a better idea than hopping a train to Mexico. If it had been my first rodeo, it would have floored me in a panic, but as I walked a few miles, prayed, and listened, I felt peace flood my soul. A strategy slowly formed in my mind. I called the mothership (our sending church) and asked to borrow their lawn chairs and some E-Z UPs;* I decided church in the park with a barbeque sounded swell. At least two accidents had been prevented, one on the ground, and one in my pants. Honestly, I had no idea if it would be the worst launch in history, but unbeknownst to me someone attached an American flag to one of the E-Z UPs, and passers-by assumed our little shindig was a 9/11 memorial service. Crowds of locals gathered that we could not have anticipated, a person from the LGBT community came to faith, and from that day forward we were addicted to outdoor church. Like the early believers in Jerusalem, we had been forced out of our comfortable “Jerusalem” and into our own personal “Judea,” resulting in something radical, risky, and completely undesirable to most. But it resulted in reaching a cross-section of urban culture that was unparalleled to anything I’d experienced.
THE ACCIDENT DRIVEN CHURCH
If Rick Warren specializes in purpose driven churches, my specialty is probably the accident driven church. I once accidentally planted a church in a Starbucks in Europe! Most of what we discovered on the front lines were like what 1970s PBS painter Bob Ross called “happy accidents.” He’d tell you that your mistakes could be deftly turned into trees with a few strokes of the brush. That never worked for me, but Bob could pull it off, and so can God. Maybe Bob’s white man’s ’fro could be explained as a happy accident. For the apostles, that happy accident was Judea. Let me set the scene about how the apostles got to Judea:
[Jerusalem] had all the makings of a megachurch experience: thousands of people, money to do anything they wanted, and ministry coming out of their ears. There was only one problem. The kingdom couldn’t advance in a holy huddle. God had to give them a spiritual kick up the backside. Enter Saul of Tarsus. Persecution smacked down on the church like Gallagher’s twenty-five-pound sledgehammer on a watermelon, splattering the seeds of the church to the far reaches of Asia Minor. If the church wouldn’t go out willingly, they’d be scattered unwillingly. That is God’s time-tested method of getting His people to heed the Great Commission. In Europe today, postmodernism has been forcing churches to venture outside to reach the unreached.1
Jesus said, “You will be my witnesses . . . in all Judea” (Acts 1:8). So what did it mean to be his witnesses in Judea, and how was it any different from being witnesses in Jerusalem?
Being his witnesses in Judea is what happens when the church has to move everything out of the context that it has known and adapt to the new culture it finds itself in. It involves traveling outside of all that we’ve known before and taking the gospel into new territory. Like the old saying goes, “Ships are always safest in the harbor, but harbors aren’t what ships are made for.”2 The church was venturing out of a safe harbor and making its first baby steps toward the end of the earth.
I’ll let you in on a little secret. Antioch was planted organically during the “Judea” period without organized leadership, without permission, and without hindrance. Ordinary believers scattered northward because of Paul’s persecution in Jerusalem, and preached Jesus to gentiles on their migration north like naughty little gospel rebels (Acts 11:19–26). Read the passage carefully. “Now those who were scattered because of the persecution that arose over Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch, speaking the word to no one except Jews. But there were some of them, men of Cyprus and Cyrene, who on coming to Antioch spoke to the Hellenists also, preaching the Lord Jesus. And the Lord was with them, and a great number who believed turned to the Lord” (Acts 11:19–21 ESV, emphasis mine). Once Peter had his vision that gave permission to preach to Gentiles, the apostles were intrigued and sent Barnabas as a fact-finding delegate up to Antioch. The nameless church planters were people that had moved through Judea—and hadn’t stopped. Something about leaving the security of your comfort zone makes people a little more daring and willing to take risks. The church was adapting as it moved through Judea, witnessing conversions, but breaking all the rules because it happened before Peter had his vision of the unclean animals, and received permission for the “eat hot dogs with heathens” outreaches. They weren’t technically “supposed to” preach to the Hellenists, but “the Lord was with them, and a great number who believed turned to the Lord” (Acts 11:21 ESV). But that’s often the case. Those who seem to be wrecking the church are often those who are reaching the lost.
Because the spreading of the gospel to Judea was a forced move, they were out of their comfort zone, and out of their depth. The apostles must have felt as if they’d gone from chillaxing in a warm Jacuzzi in Jerusalem to a cold cannonball plunge into Judea’s cold unheated pool. Leaving your “Jerusalem” is always a sink or swim affair. The Jerusalem Christians were forced to leave the houses and temple behind that they’d normally done ministry in, but that was because God was on the move. Since the death and resurrection of Jesus, God had busted out of the temple building so that the church could bust loose to the ends of the earth. God refused to allow his glory to be confined to the man-made temple anymore. Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis had left the building.
We’ve spent years trying to convince young leaders that if they listened to enough talks from big church leaders, CEOs, and people from Chick-fil-A, they’d have the church of their dreams. Shame on us. When the believers spread out to Judea and moved beyond Jerusalem, they were forced to leave corporate religion behind. Judea was like the Wild West, and their eviction from Jerusalem forced them to innovate new ways of reaching the unreached culture they found themselves in. Paul, ever the innovator, would have his passport book stamped with many visas before his mission was done, and each city would require some new type of adaptation to reach the unreached. In Jerusalem, they had a temple to bring the people to, whereas, throughout Judea, they had to learn the skill of taking church to the people. The Jerusalem years of the eighties and nineties when the unchurched came to our buildings ended in the new millennium, and now we must go to them. Because like it or not, like the Christians forced to be witnesses in Judea, we’re running out of alternatives.
Many churches are still prepping themselves for the future that isn’t coming. Our strategies rely upon utilizing tomorrow the buildings we’ve built today. But if Europe is an indication of where things are going, yesterday’s ornate church buildings are going to be converted to tomorrow’s nightclubs, mosques, and carpet warehouses. It is disheartening to stand in an intricately carved gothic stonework church building, where the gospel once thundered forth, but where the pulpit now serves as a DJ booth in a swanky nightclub. Like the subterranean Cold War bunkers buried in backyards across America, our church fortifications when the future we anticipate fails to materialize. Like Europe, the bastions of religion will serve as barriers to the culture around them and endure as lifeless monuments to a wasteful age of opulence and misguided priorities. Inevitably, there are leaders who feel powerless to change things, but are going through the motions, hoping, despite their dwindling megachurch attendance, that there will be enough money to see them through retirement. Many leaders are in a holding period, and they know it. They’re hoping you don’t.
RAIDING THE LOST ART
In Acts 1:8 Jesus told us it’s not the time to hold ground, but time to take it. He’s hell-bent on advancing the kingdom of heaven. And it’s no accident that it advances most rapidly in Africa and Asia, where buildings aren’t always an option. If all of this is true, then somebody who wants to be able to get ahead of the curve needs to master ministry in public space.
Recovering the lost art of reaching the unreached will involve ditching desk job ministry and getting out into the field. It will involve shedding our glasses and bow ties, leaving the lecture halls, and donning the fedora, grabbing the bullwhip, and venturing out into the jungle. If you’ve been paying attention to Indiana Jones, the jungle is where the treasure is found. That’s why the apostles were masters of ministry in public spaces. In Acts 5:42, they met “in the temple courts and from house to house.” Some have imagined that house churches are cutting edge, but nothing is more cutting edge than “temple courts.” Many have misread “temple courts” in Acts 5 as being synonymous with church buildings, but the temple courts were a far more public community hub. The apostles visited the temple during the busiest time of the day, when people congregated for prayer (Acts 3:1). By preaching in the temple courts, the apostles were practicing the lost art of ministry in open venues. Being truly missional will mean gathering where people already gather. Despite the missional movement making some advances, we’re still primarily inviting people into our space instead of invading theirs; albeit homes instead of church buildings. I speak with many missional leaders, and their struggles are not much different from established church leaders. They’re still struggling to reach the unreached beyond their four walls, be it church walls or house walls. They both feel walled off from their communities.
The scattering of believers into reaching the unreached in the unfamiliar territory of Judea involved God working in completely new ways. They lacked the building, the money, the programs, and security they’d known in Jerusalem. Without those things, they were forced to step out in faith in a spirit of experimentation. There’s just one problem; experimentation inherently involves the risk of failure. And we’re as uncomfortable with failure as we are with forced moves. But without risk and experimentation, innovation is impossible. We forget that all great innovators, regardless of their field, tended to be greater “failures” than they were successes. That’s because innovation in any field, including mission, tends to fail forward. Of course in mission, the only failures are the ones who never try. Thomas Edison didn’t think of his failures as failures. He once told a reporter that he didn’t fail one thousand times to create the lightbulb, but that creating the lightbulb was a one-thousand-step process. Reading the life stories of Imagineers like Jim Henson, George Lucas, Steve Jobs, and Walt Disney demonstrate not only that they saw things that nobody else saw, but more importantly, they were willing to bank their entire lives on things that nobody else thought would work. There seemed no other option for them but to break the mold, innovate, and go boldly where no man had gone before. George Lucas himself believed that a sci-fi movie, if done correctly, could become a leading blockbuster, yet no studio would fund his crazy space movie in the Tunisian desert. The necessity of a ridiculously low budget dictated that he innovate new ways of filming, building props, and creating sound effects. Disney himself went bankrupt once, and for most of his career lived on the verge of a second one, going hand to mouth, from picture to picture. Once, his brother Roy called him, distraught at the banks collecting two million dollars they didn’t have. Ever the optimist, Walt laughed and reminded Roy of the time when they couldn’t get the banks to loan them twenty thousand dollars for a movie, telling him to be proud of how far they’d come. We love to read the biographies of the experimental innovators, risk-takers, gamblers, and game changers who had the guts to risk it all for their vision.
But nobody wants to be “that guy.”
A famous cricketer and pioneer asked a similar question when he surveyed the church. “The gamblers for money are so many. Where are the gamblers for God?”3 Mission seems to be lacking risk-takers in the ranks. A Steve-Jobs-caliber innovator may be as rare in the church as he was in the tech world. It’s only so often that a John Wesley, George Whitefield, William Booth, or Seth Morgan comes along. As society constantly shifts around us, churches are being forced to innovate ways to reach the unreached. Personally, my money is on the happy accidents more than the paid strategists. The church that weathers the future will be less dependent upon buildings, methods, and structures and more on natural missional engagements. God may be waiting to break through using something as radical as pitching a tent in a bean field or raising up young people as daring as Whitefield, who take the church out of the context it’s always known. What if God was the gambler, gambling on a church that was willing to gamble on him, trusting his power to work in new ways?
I believe that being “witnesses in Judea” today means learning to innovate ways of engaging lost people in public spaces and leaving the “Jerusalem” of our buildings.
WHERE IT’S AT
Stephen was martyred for preaching against meeting in a building. Let that sink in. You could say the religious culture in Jerusalem was pretty attached to the temple. Stephen’s main point in his sermon was that you couldn’t really cage God up inside of a box, even if that box was the Holy of Holies. In the Old Testament, the building symbolized the focal point of God’s active presence, but the New Testament equates God’s activity with being encountered wherever one finds two or more. Incidentally, Jesus sent them out on mission in groups of two’s. Are you beginning to see a pattern? That’s why taking it to the streets, and letting God out of the box, is so imperative. The first result of the Holy Spirit being poured out in power was turn the church out on the streets. The apostles were immediately driven out of the upper room and into a public space with a capacity of thousands. Examine Acts closely. The entire book practically takes place outside. So do the gospels. Jesus sends them out into the villages and hamlets, largely against their will, feeling unprepared, ill-equipped, and in need of further training. Both before and after Pentecost, Jesus trained them to go to the people, instead of waiting for the people to come to them. Trace church history and you’ll find every ground-breaking movement of the Holy Spirit resulted in the church crossing not only cultural barriers, but its own barriers as well. You can have the big gold temple, complete with a marketplace, smoke billowing out, and a revered priesthood, but still fail to reach the world around you. Ironically, we still strive to cram everybody into the “temple” for the “come to Jesus” meeting when our culture is more primed for the New Testament experience of small community than we are. They crave authenticity through social media and meet-up groups. The church should have led the way on community. Instead, churches have been desperate to return to the establishment of megacenters of worship that resemble the temple in Jerusalem with all of its wealth, power, and prestige. And that’s the last thing this next generation needs.
We need Stephen’s sermon as desperately as the first-century religious leaders did. “The Most High does not live in houses made by human hands” (Acts 7:48). Reaching the unreached is no longer dependent upon a building, even if we are.
Would we pick up rocks to stone Stephen if he preached to us today about abandoning our million dollar buildings? Moreover, would we be willing to leave our buildings if it meant more effectively reaching the unreached? When the church made its way to Judea, it became skilled at doing ministry in a new context.
God has been trying to bust out of the box, and we keep trying to stuff him back in. We’ve been inviting God to join us inside, but God has been inviting us to join him in his work “out there” for nearly two thousand years. Make no mistake. He’s been waiting for us to join him in the work, but he hasn’t waited to get to work in people’s lives. He’s already dwelling outside the camp, working hard, getting down to business.
Is that scandalous to you? It scandalized me when I began experiencing it firsthand as a missionary. It was surprising to Peter. Peter found God working in Cornelius before he, the mighty apostle, and veteran missionary, showed up. God had already been talking to Cornelius without him. Imagine the nerve . . .
I BRING THIS!
Over the years, I’ve had a number of “Cornelius Moments.” These are when the Holy Spirit shows you he’s been very busy, even when you haven’t. One of my neighbors was a million miles away from attending any church, but God drew near to her as she desperately read an Alcoholics Anonymous prayer book in secret each night. In the pages of that book, she struggled to connect with a “higher power,” struggled with alcoholism, and struggled with depression that incapacitated her and made her a recluse. My wife and I invited her and her husband to a barbecue at our house. They showed up drunk, stoned, and in an argument that turned into an epic shouting match, then left. As their screams echoed down the road, my wife and I looked at each other, disappointed that we’d probably never get to know them. We dropped by a week later to check on them, and the moment we stepped into her house, we walked into an atmosphere as thick as a jello mold with the presence of God. I remember feeling scandalized. Wait! I bring this! I’m the missionary! If it had been a public service commercial, the narrator would have freeze-framed over my face and narrated, “Bad little missionary boy, you’ve been playing in the whitewash. You are about to discover a roaring ocean of activity that God has been involved in, and has been inviting his church to plunge into for the past few thousand years.” That was when my skies started falling. Oh what a dumb, dumb chicken little.
The biblical names Cornelius, Jethro, and Melchizedek are just a few of the “outsiders” God worked with outside the church, and rather than that being a deterrent from us going out, it should serve as a massive encouragement. Out of everything that gives me strength and courage, it’s God’s sovereign activity and his passionate heart for people outside of the church’s walls that move me most. Without that knowledge, I’d be too afraid to move. No joke, whenever I talk to people my internal monologue is questioning how God is already moving in their lives before Johnny-on-the-Spot turned up. Even when they are hostile, I rely on the old proverb, “when you throw a rock into a pack of dogs, the one who yelps the loudest is the one who got hit.” God is always moving. He’s not confined to where we are. He wants to hitch you up to what he’s already doing in the wide open world. That’s why Jesus said, “My father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working” (John 5:17). If you’re fasting and praying, asking God to do the heavy lifting, you’re not going to be the first one to arrive at the party, but turning up fashionably late, after God’s already started the conversation with the ones you’re trying to reach.
What Judeas can we venture out into that we’re not currently going? Being witnesses in Judea means leaving our Jerusalem, the place where we’ve grown comfortable, and frequenting the spaces of people who are not like you. It’s pushing the boat a little bit further out from the dock. It may not be to the end of the earth, just to the edge of your personal world. I’m talking about moving further out than you ever have without being forced to. It could be crossing the seas to engage a foreigner or crossing the street to your neighbor. It could be crossing to the other side of the economic, ethnic, or religious tracks in the city you live in. Being his witnesses in Judea means somehow going out of your way to boldly go where you have never gone before. Reaching the unreached begins when each believer crosses their personal boundaries, not national borders. When you reach the end of your personal boundaries, he’ll be waiting for you in the No Man’s Land beyond the barbed wire. It’s like opening a door to go out at the same time that somebody is opening the door to come in from the opposite side. You end up face to face with God.
IT ONLY TAKES ONE
I’ve already told you I have the spiritual gift of accidents. On my second international church planting gig in New Zealand, I was leading an evangelistic team to the town square in Auckland, where the plan was to do some cool thing and then talk to hundreds of skaters congregating there. Except it didn’t shake out that way. Instead, it turned out like a scene in Casablanca:
Captain Renault: What in heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca?
Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.
Captain Renault: The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert.
Rick: I was misinformed.
We had been misinformed. The town square was a ghost town. There were no youth, no skaters. Worse still, to reach it we’d trekked a grueling hour, getting lost, and enduring the constant whine “Is it much further, Papa Smurf?”
“Not much further,” I’d say with the same barely concealed aggravation Papa Smurf managed.
We arrived at the fountain in the middle of the square like Ponce De LeÓn looking for the fountain of youth, and about as equally disappointed at the site of no one there. It would be a gross understatement to say I was angry. Remember when David and his men pursued the Philistines, leaving their women and children at Ziklag? After the battle, David and his troops return only to find that a marauding band has carried their families away captive. David’s troops picked up rocks to stone David, adding insult to injury (1 Sam. 30:6). It was kind of like that. Frustrated, tired, and ready to kill someone, I walked up to a random guy, like Jonah begrudgingly delivering his message to Nineveh. I muttered, “Hey, we’re going to do this Jesus thing. You wanna watch?” He looked at me as he lit his cigarette flippantly and said, “Okay.” We did our “cool thing” presenting the gospel like the little dwarves marching angrily around the eighteen-inch Stonehenge in This Is Spinal Tap. As we packed up, ready to walk off, I looked back at the guy standing there. Tears rolled down his cheeks. We invited him to pizza, where he unloaded his life story, sobbing the whole time. He had been living in a friend’s garden shed for a few weeks after his life had fallen apart, and that night, he had determined to douse himself with gasoline and light a match. Not only did God intervene in what would have been a horrific suicide, he became a deacon of that church plant the very next year. We learned a lesson that night. We’d traveled far out of our way, like Jesus sojourning to Samaria, and we’d found somebody sitting at a well, just waiting for somebody to talk to him. Sometimes reaching the unreached is as simple as finding an out-of-your-way well to sit on.
Stepping out of your comfort zone to reach the unreached will force you to innovate like Paul, who left the religious culture he’d always known and stepped into a culture of innovation, adaptation, and freedom. Embarking for Turkey on his first missionary journey, Paul failed forward, and adapted in each port of call, and learned more about how Jesus still worked to reach people the further out he went on each successive missionary journey. He experimented with the dangerous combustive material of the Holy Spirit resulting in explosive kingdom expansion. Your faith is a result of it.
THE LOST ART OF MINISTRY IN OPEN SPACE
Once you know that God is already at work “out there” it’s not such a daunting place to be. The more we invade public spaces, and meet in the temple courts, the more we find ourselves riding shotgun on divine appointments. Just ask Philip from the “witness in Judea” period as he hitchhiked in the middle of the desert and was picked up by the Treasurer of Ethiopia. A few years after launching in the open air, Refuge Long Beach tried to meet back inside after one of our team leaders convinced us that we would serve our families better with classrooms rather than EZ-UPs. Meeting in a public school our second year looked promising (because wrapping construction netting around EZ-UPs doesn’t make the best Sunday school atmosphere—especially when the drunk people leer at the kids.) But to our urban, multi-ethnic church plant, meeting in the school auditorium felt as unnatural as David trying to wear Saul’s armor. Instead, we traded in the wooden 1950s seats of an auditorium for the lunch tables outside in the public school yard. That was the poorest school in the district, and they served breakfast to the students so that they’d get at least two meals a day. As part of our outreach strategy, we welcomed people from off of the street, ate with them, and held our church service in the open air. According to Whitefield, “I now preach to ten times more people than I would if I had been confined to churches.”4
Most churches get kicked out of their building.
Not us. We got kicked into our building.
One resident from a nearby apartment started writing us angry letters about the noise. The best part was the “P.S. Your music is NOT good.” We apologized, lowered the volume, and prayed to love our neighbors better. A few Sundays later, that same man was taking out his trash when he was captivated by the gospel message on Romans 8 that drifted over the alley wall. He stopped and listened to the entire sermon while standing by a dumpster. When the sermon was finished, he rounded the corner, weeping, and told us he had heard God speak to him.
A few weeks after that, while I was preaching, another resident yelled over the wall, “You’re too loud.” Someone in our service piped up, “He’s next!”
WALKING INTO THE STRIP CLUB
The witnesses in Judea tell us it’s not hard to reach the unreached, as long as we’re not making it harder than necessary by restricting ourselves to the confines of a building. I’m not anti-building by any means, but I’m convinced it’s harder to reach people that way. When we first started meeting in the school, we would serve breakfast outside on the school benches before the service. After breakfast, we would move inside to worship, but some people would leave. So we conducted a controlled experiment. On the Sundays we continued to meet outside, the people who normally left after eating breakfast with us stayed for the service. Our takeaway was that a doorway isn’t really a portal. It’s a barrier.
When it comes to church, walking through the doorway feels as foreign as coming into God’s living room like a stranger off the street. It’s like an imaginary line around Les Wessman’s cubicle space that many people just won’t cross.5 My mentor Peter Jeffery once quipped, “It’s as awkward for your neighbor to walk through the doors of this church to hear about Jesus, as it is for you to walk through the doors of a strip club.” The physical act of walking through a door means you’re a part of “this,” and the last thing people want is to commit to something when they walk through church doors. Rather than lower the standards of the gospel to make everybody feel comfortable, we pulled a Wesleyan maneuver and continued to meet outside on a regular basis. Heck, we pulled a Jesus. He preached in boats, fields, mounts, and graveyards. C. T. Studd once remarked, “Some want to live within the sound of church or chapel bell; I want to run a rescue shop within a yard of hell.”6
GETTING YOUR FREAK ON
Are you hearing my thoughts on this, because I think I’m hearing yours. At one time I feared, like you probably are, that if our churches ventured into public spaces, we’d be labeled as weirdos, freaks. I’ve never been keen on making Christians look even crazier than we already do, so I shied away from taking church outside the four walls even though it thrilled me to read about it when William Booth or John Wesley did it. But I eventually decided that rather than the church having an “outreach ministry,” the church service would be the outreach. It’s radical, it’s risky, but it’s effective, and it’s taken me nearly twenty years to arrive here.
Blame Europe. Embarking for Europe as a church-planting missionary fifteen years ago, I got my first taste of open air ministry when I served at Martyn-Lloyd Jones’s legendary church as the evangelist when the elders wanted me to preach on Saturday mornings in the town square. I found it awkward, but I couldn’t shake the conviction that Wesley, Whitefield, and William Booth had discovered a way that could take church to the people, instead of expecting the people to come to the church. Feeling conflicted about open air preaching, I experimented with less invasive public discussion groups on university campuses and pubs and eventually launched that accidental church in a Starbucks. Spurgeon said, “No sort of defense is needed for preaching outdoors, but it would take a very strong argument to prove that a man who has never preached beyond the walls of his meetinghouse has done his duty. A defense is required for services within buildings rather than for worship outside of them.”7
I wasn’t the first one in Wales to conduct experiments. Wales is a rough place, borne out of centuries of backbreaking work, hauling coal, building ships and railways, and fueling the backbone of the expansion of the British Empire on the backs of hardened Welsh laborers. Into this poverty and deprivation stepped the three lads who founded a church planting mission known as the Forward Movement. When the churches were either going backwards or stalled in their tracks, they took the church out to the streets and propelled it forward. Their names were David Pugh, and his two brothers, Frank and Seth Joshua. One of them had been a prize fighter, so he erected a boxing ring, issuing the challenge that if anyone could take him, he’d go home, but if he won, they’d all have to listen to him preach. It worked. Rough, hardened, calloused men were won to Christ. Within fifteen years of those three lads hitting the streets, thirty evangelists had planted forty-eight centers of worship with twenty-two thousand attendees (1,056 of which were on probation). One morning, Pugh was passing by the walls of Cardiff Prison and noticed the crowds of paroled convicts exiting the gatehouse. Criminals awaited them in the crowds, ready to scoop them up and recruit them back into a life of crime, “I gotta job for ya, mate! Come with me.” Within days, Pugh arranged a ministry to meet the prisoners outside the gates at 8:00 a.m. each day in time for their release with an invitation card to a free breakfast at a local tavern. After breakfast, the gospel was preached, and legit jobs were arranged. This was the precursor to the revival of 1904–1905, where God began to move in power.
None of this could have been done behind church walls.
I began to wonder what it might look like to have a “forward movement” in our generation; churches that invaded public spaces in a non-invasive way. The key to ministry in public spaces is to do the things people naturally do in those public spaces. This often happens in what sociologists call third spaces. What are third spaces? Back up the truck and let me run over the first two.
First spaces are where people live. Naturally, you eat together, let the kids play together, watch the game, or films, and help your neighbors do projects in the first place of your home. For this reason, hospitality is an evangelistic gift in the New Testament, and a job requirement for all elders who need to be able to open their homes to reach their neighbors.
Second places are where people work. It’s not where you live, it’s not where you want to be, it’s where you have to be (if you want money). Paul owned this space like a boss. He found the marketplace, the place where people trafficked, and penetrated it with the gospel. Paul was bi-vocational partly so that he could support his team on mission (Acts 20:4), but mostly so he could traffic with and be exposed to people he was called to reach. Although he could have asked for support from the churches he planted, and he defended that right (1 Tim. 5:18), going to the marketplace was more conducive to mission. In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, when Indy is asked disbelievingly, “You’re a professor?” he replies, “Only part-time.”
Third places are the places you want to be. You go to third places to unwind, relax, or be a part of a community. Again, the key to pulling off church in public space is to find a way to adapt the missional aspects of Acts 2:42 to what that third space already does. That’s why a book club in the local bookstore coffee shop can naturally become a church, without seeming invasive. After the first night at Starbucks, when I threw a Da Vinci Code discussion night, they begged to meet again, and on the second night, even more people turned up. It became a book club, which eventually became a church. Recovery groups, support groups, a cooking class, the gym, or any place people traffic are all places to serve people. I personally wouldn’t stand up and preach in the middle of my gym. That would be weird. Yet Paul preached in the Areopagus at Mars Hill because that’s what people already did there. In places where people met for dialogue and interaction, Paul changed his tactics and reasoned with them, as he did in the synagogue. Today we have community crossroads at coffee houses, and breweries, and classrooms. As long as you’re doing what’s natural in that space, you can adapt mission to fit it.
One of the upcoming marketplaces is the local brewery. After watching the trendy white middle class discover microbreweries, I’ve realized it’s all the rage. After living in the UK for twelve years, I’ve come to think it’s cute that Americans are so impressed with their “craft beer.” Europeans have been perfecting the art for thousands of years, and every village has a local brewery. Love booze or hate it, the Pharisees weren’t too crazy about the places Jesus met with people either. Yet you’ll spend far less effort approaching people in their space, the local pub, than trying to entice them away from the bar. A few years ago, a friend and I were having a beer at a local brewery. As he told me about his son’s generation, he confessed, “I sit here, and I look around at these kids, just like my son, and I feel hopeless. How are we gonna reach this generation?” Without taking my eyes off of one of the brewers, I said, “Watch.”
I kick-started a conversation, “Hey, me and my buddy were just talking about what it would look like to do church here. How do you think that would go?”
The guy sneered, and remarked that he didn’t like religious people at all. Just then, a server was walking by and said, “Yeah, they’re so self-righteous. They think they’re better than everyone.”
I asked, “But not with a beer in their hand, right? You can’t think you’re any better than anybody while holding a beer, or am I wrong?”
They stopped in their tracks, and the brewer said, “That might actually make a huge difference. If they could sit and have a beer, and talk politely about God, I might be open to that.” For the next few minutes, we talked about what a conversation like that could look like. In essence, we had a mini-session right there with the bar-back. Before we left, my buddy shook his head and said, “I’m in shock. I can’t believe what just happened here. My son would go to something like that.”
Alex Early started a church in a bar that grew to hundreds of previously unchurched people. It all happened because as a seminary student coming out of church one Sunday morning, he noticed the pub on the opposite side of the street. He also noticed that the people who went to one building never went to the other, and Alex wasn’t cool with that. So he pulled a “witness in Judea” maneuver. He got a job as a bar-back praying that God be the sovereign God he knew him to be. And Jesus started reaching people in the Judea of that bar.
That said, this works great for middle-class suburbanites, but where I’ve been lately, the last thing on earth you’d do was go anywhere near alcohol. The people at Refuge are kicking heroin, crack, and prescription meds. Alcohol is not the friend of recovery ministry, nor does it help people get clean. Besides, I’ve been on a beer fast for about a year now. This isn’t an apologetic for drinking beer, but an apologetic for reaching people where they are (not where you want them to be). Some of you are called to drink beer missionally, and others of us are missional teetotalers.
GO TO HELL. WE DON’T CARE.
Recently, I had breakfast with church-planting legend Bob Logan. He said that he’d been called into a church that was failing to reach its community, yet doing nothing to improve the situation. All of their money was going back into improving the church building and keeping the lights on. Bob told them that if they were honest, they would arrange letters on the church sign out front to spell “Go to Hell. We don’t care.” Truth be told, million dollar church buildings silently scream that rich churches with bags of cash care more for their building than they do the neighborhood surrounding it. In response, people no longer trust anything that resembles a Walmart for their soul. For the millennials it’s not about what you say you believe, it’s about how you show it. That’s actually a biblical sentiment. The apostle James might relate to the millennials more than we realize. Actions speak louder than words. They know that if our churches run like corporations, it’s because we’ve ignored the words of our CEO, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matt. 6:21). They’ve figured out where our treasure is by where we put our money, and it’s not where our mouth is. Can you blame them if they take Jesus at his word, even if we don’t? What if we stopped investing our money in the buildings, and invested in the community instead? Might it build more of a monument and visible witness than our edifices?
START SMALL
According to John’s gospel, conversations equaled conversions. All of these encounters I’ve mentioned provide opportunities to engage with live specimens out in the field. One of my church planting students was challenged when I asked them to lead somebody to Christ that week. Most students looked at me, eyes wide with disbelief that I’d assign them to actually do the very thing that church planting is all about. But one student was haunted by the fact that it seemed so challenging. He remembered something that I’d said about reaching the unreached: just get out there and have conversations.
Every morning he drove past a bus stop and prayed for the people standing there. On a cold autumn morning after the assignment, he picked up a Starbucks traveler carton, and armed with cups and creamer, parked his butt at the bus stop and started pouring out cups of coffee, handing them to total strangers waiting for the bus. At first, they looked at him like the anti-social psychotic person who missed his chance at hiding razor blades in apples or poisoning Halloween candy. But after one person succumbed to the pull of the magic energy juice, the others began to take the hot liquid like cautious, superstitious natives taking trinkets from a pilgrim from the new world. That’s when the conversations started. An hour later he sat on the bench next to a middle-aged African-American employee on his way to work who missed his bus so he could listen to the gospel. Although the employee was late on his journey he’d started out on, he embarked on a new journey of salvation in the cold, gray dawn at a bus stop. Thanks to somebody starting small and just going out of his way a little bit.
BREAKING THE MOLD
To what other groups could you venture out and meet on their own turf? Sociologists speak of tribes. Harley Davidson riders are a tribe, as are users of Apple products. Cyclists in Portland, Oregon, belong to an undefined community in which the bonds are strong. Gamers, tech nerds, cosplay geeks, and hip hop enthusiasts can all be identified by appearance because they adopt the tribal dress, language, humor, rituals, and customs of their particular subculture. How would we adapt church to any of these tribes to become witnesses in Judea?
For example, what would a church that wanted to reach bikers in Daytona Beach look like? After the wake for a biker buried at a biker bar hidden in the heart of the San Gabriel Mountains in Los Angeles, a handful of bikers approached me, asking where my church was. If I planted a biker church, it would change locations every week and you’d go on an organized ride to get to the biker bar. You’d arrive, bond, eat, and do church outside somewhere. Now if I could rock a pulpit made out of a gas tank and complete with handlebars, that’d be bonus. Worship would be hard, fast, and furious, where men could raise a beer to Jesus and shout the words like a fight song. I would have more testimonies than Alcoholics Anonymous. I’d shoot straight, but preach grace in the hopes that the Spirit would fall like a sledgehammer with the gentle word that would break the bone (Prov. 25:15). Men like to laugh, so there’d be plenty of room for that. After you got baptized into Christ, you might get jumped into the church. Yeah, the biker church that exists inside my head is pretty cool, but it only exists in my head. Ridiculous, right? I’d think so too, except what I witnessed at the biker tavern funeral wasn’t far off. They listened to the gospel, drank beer, laughed, wept, and came up to me afterwards, broken, and hungry for spiritual things. You can reach any tribe if you’re willing to adopt that tribe’s customs for the sake of the gospel.
Okay, swinging the pendulum to the opposite side of the spectrum, what would an outreach church for astronomy nerds look like? Start with stargazing at 2:00 a.m. under the night sky in the desert. Eggheads who could talk the cosmos, quantum physics, the speed of light, and power of God stuff would be a must. We’d bless the Creator and blow our minds with a Louie Giglio-style multi-media presentation of God of the universe, and everything with a flavor of Yancey, and a dash of C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity. It’d be hardcore smart-people stuff. Most of you probably wouldn’t understand it. There would be no chairs, we’d be laying on our backs on our sleeping bags, watching light travel. S’mores. Question time. Maybe a little number by Mozart, Wagner, or Vaughn Williams during a time people are told to “wonder,” tripping on the fact that the God who made the universe also made our minds to compose and enjoy masterpieces. A talk on neuroethology. It would be a practical ambush of the soul, using David’s Psalm 8 nighttime worship session under the stars wherein he marvels that God even thinks of him at all.
How would I reach fishermen on the end of the pier? Gamers? Artists?
Well, you get the picture. I could do this all day.
Your turn.
Discussion Questions
(For Dr. Jones, the Princeton Professor in you)
1. Describe life in the comfort zone for you? What is your typical routine?
2. How have you been challenged to shake it up or do something different?
3. Imagine your church building suddenly caught fire and burned down and your church had to meet without a building. Where would be the most strategic area to meet? What would you do?
4. How do you think that lost people in your community would react to it?
Adventurous Actions
(For Indiana, the Temple Raider in you)
1. Look online for some type of meetup group, gym, or coffee shop. Plan a one-time public event. It could be a discussion group or service to a particular part of the community.
2. Pray!
*The shelters. Not to be confused with Easy Ups diapers . . . although in this emergency it did feel a little like diapers for our church plant’s little accident.