I enjoyed spending some more time with our friends/co-workers at Reba Place Fellowship.  We are continuing to see how we can partner with them in following the Lord together and sharing the Gospel with new people groups around the city.  Allan Howe, one of the leaders of the fellowship met with us today, along with several from Good News Partners, an inner city homeless ministry.  As is usual when talking to those on the edge of Kingdom life, the question of “how will this be funded” floated to the surface.

This issue has been on my mind for quite some time now.  It seems that too many people have a desire or a vision for a radical work or ministry, but too few have the capacity to see it come to fruition.  Underfunding could stem from any number of reasons.  Whether its an issue with the skill of vision casting, or a dreamer’s desire to be so radical that it leaves him/her unaccountable to the larger body of Christ, or maybe its an issue of spiritual warfare, or its just that God’s timing for a ministry is not quite our own… It seems that ministries increasingly will have to pay attention to their funding if they are to remain sustainable in effective ministry.

Some have concluded that they cannot receive funding from congregations or missions organizations and instead feel called to “tentmaking.”  Tentmaking is just a fancy way of saying that you use your job to pay for your vocation, and that your business fuses organically with God’s mission.  The apostle Paul, Priscilla and Aquilla did that, and so have countless others.  Others believe that support from churches is where they need to be.  That’s cool too.  “A worker deserves his wages,” Jesus said, and spent time as a mason as well as receiving his living wage from women who had rich husbands (some of which were in business with Herod himself!).  Others still find a workable blend of both roads.

A few books that have shaped my thinking on this are Getting Sent: A Relational Approach to Support Raising, by Pete Sommer, No More Mondays, by Dan Miller, Missions and Money: Affluence as a Missionary Problem, by Jon Bonk, and Profit for the Lord: Economic Activities in the Moravian Missions and the Basel Mission Trading Company, by William Danker.

While I think that those called to a missionary must learn that the world does not revolve around them and their ministry (and that we must learn to become accountable to the larger body of Christ in relational and financial ways), I also think that each ministry must seek eventual self-sustainability.  In order to do this, we must allow the “creative starter” giftings of the missionary to encourage entrepreneurial capital ventures, but keep it from becoming a means of significant distraction from their real work of training leaders to plant churches.  It is not a bad thing for students training to be missionaries to take some key business classes to help them get their arms around economic enterprise.

At the same time, I would hope that financial ties to the rest of the Body of Christ would never be completely severed.  Much like a biological family - even after the children are grown, they help each other out when times get rough or share resources for special interest projects (like a family reunion, or supporting a needy member of the family).

Reba has found that when a group shares resources, more risks can be made - both in ministry and in business.  It’s easier to start a business when you instantly have nearly 100 people financially backing you!

Ultimately though, we work and sweat and prepare - and then we must wait for the Lord to provide.  Right now I work part time at a restaurant in the neighborhood.  I run around like crazy setting the place up in hopes that when we open the doors at 5:30, there will be people interested in eating there, receiving my work, and (mostly unbeknownst to them) supporting urban missions!  There’s an interesting passage in Isaiah 40 that says,

“Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

“Waiting” on the Lord includes lots of work!  But their strength comes from the Lord, and from knowing that ultimately the Lord will be their resource.  When it comes to financial life and ministry today, not much has changed.

I look forward to the day when, like the apostles in Acts 6, I can hand off “waiting tables” to others.  For the time being however, I am learning in my job what it means to earn a living, and seeking humility as a server even as I reach out to those I work with as one who has found the Peace that changes lives.  I’m thankful that Jesus gave us flexibilty in this area of funding missions - and I learn so much from others who are much father into this experiment than I am.

I got these two (count them, TWO) great Chicago maps for my birthday in early August, but just recently had the money saved to purchase legit frames for them!  I’m psyched about hanging them in my office (or sharing one with a friend or placing elsewhere in the house - didn’t expect to have two of them), and studying the layout of the city, as well as learning to pray for the city a chunk at a time.  What do you think would be possible if a whole city began to pray for peace?

A few other church planters and I are looking into Wikispaces as a common ground for spiritual mapping and saturation church planting.  Its a neat site - imagine: you’re own free wiki on ANYTHING or EVERYTHING you like!  How cool is the internet!?!

Finding myself drinking coffee more and more these days.  I’ve begun to call it my “liquid intelligence,” but I’m not sure if I like that.  Journaling, coffee, prayer, and an active imagination are the things that usually fill my mornings.  Also, I’ve been gravitating more and more to Pandora’s rockin’ Trance station.  Check out all my fave stations and rock out with me here.  I love the digital age!

I’m finding more and more in the city and region who are experimenting with communal discipleship, organic church planting, and the like.  Yesterday I traveled out to West Chicago and had spent most of the day at the Wyclife Bible Translation center with other church planter types.  Joe Hernandez with CityTeam Ministries was there, leading the discussion.

I notice that in this whole church planting conversation, there are two emphases at least that fill the air.  One group sees house churches as a means to develop more authentic community.  Where you take the programs, clergy, and other obstacles out of the way and just have family life together.  The problem I see with this approach is that these groups usually bring in many more Christians than those unsure of their relationship with God.  And more often than not, these Christians have such baggage from their previous church experience that you spend all your time deconstructing and sometimes criticizing the “institutional church” (as if there is ever a “un-institutional church” - a fallacy) that little gets done in the way of loving neighbors, or transforming lives into the image of Christ.

Besides that issue, there’s LOTS more “authentic” expressions of church than just meeting in a home!  If you want to see a good picture of deep, holistic Christian community, check out Reba Place Fellowship, or L’Arche Communities, or so many other intentional Christian communities.  Why stop at just being “family” when you meet together for worship?  I find that most Christians meeting in house churches either come to it expecting to become the superstar of their little group (thus defeating community), or they are just on the way to the next step of a more full-time intentional expression (like living in a house together, or sharing finances).

These are all awesome journeys to be on, and some days I wish I could have more than one life to do them all.  But in this life I feel called to go the second path in church planting: the path that brings the profoundly lost into a transforming relationship with Jesus Christ.  Joe Hernandez (like Neil Cole and many others) are focused specifically on this goal too.

I’ve seen it happen.  Whole communities come to Christ because one person in their group found something amazing in Christ’s teaching.  She found it because someone showed it to her.  Someone planted the Gospel in her heart, then SHE plants the church in her own group of friends!  This is where the organic church has something healthy to contribute to the emerging church landscape in America, and around the world.  Plant the gospel deeply into multiple contexts, worldviews, and people groups (not holding it in just one, and not keeping it for the Christians weighted with baggage.)  It has been almost 180 years since the last real explosion of church planting on this continent.  It’s time to start praying for God’s power to flood our lands again.

Welcome to my ongoing series on prayer walking and discovering God in the wildly diverse city of Chicago!

I’m not doing this alone - there is a collaborative effort underway to encourage city street prayer walking and discovery with church planters, churches, and college students all across the city. Find our wiki here.

Chicago is a mission field, it is our mission field.

There are 77 recognized community areas in the city, making it one of the most glocal, ethnically diverse, and contrasted cities in the world. The people of Chicago are fiercely loyal to their ‘hood and many (though they live in a global city) rarely leave the boundaries of their blocks for another part of town.

My hopes are to make good use of my CTA Chicago card; using buses and trains to travel to and in these different communities. I will do my best to write reflections on what I saw, felt, and heard from God as I navigate through the city. My assumption is that God is already at work in their neighborhoods (in bars, churches, and city streets), and a missionary’s job is to find him and point him out for others to see. My centering prayer will come from Luke 10, asking God our Father, the Lord of the Harvest, to raise up workers in the desperate harvest field of that particular neighborhood.

With so many villages to pray through, (there are 77 recognized areas, but most maps draw up about 237 neighborhoods), I’m thinking I may also look for teammates in this work, and start a collaborative project to draw out a complete “spiritual map” of the city. If you are a church planter in Chicago or would like to work on this with me, please email me (see “Contact Us” on this blog’s sidebar).

Why spend so much energy on this project? My firm belief is that first and foremost God’s people depend on God through prayer. If there is to be a church planting movement with lives transformed and the gospel proclaimed afresh, it will come through a prayer movement. One that has its ear close to the ground, to see what God is doing in the streets.

This will be sort of a “live” post, meaning I’ll be updating it as a directory to posts about each neighborhood. To learn what I found from each neighborhood, click on the name of each below:

Following is a list of the Chicago Community Areas by community area number (see map).

May God get the glory!

Two weeks ago I was graduating with my masters. One week ago I was back in the classroom. Yeah, I’m asking the very same question you are! “WHY!?!?”

ACU was “nice enough” to let me graduate 3 hours short of my degree, so long as I took and passed a summer one-week intensive course. I naturally picked a class right after my regular semester ended, to get the course completed as quickly as possible. I chose “Emerging Culture & Emerging Churches” with Dr. Chris Flanders. Flanders got his Phd from Fuller Seminary, and before that was a missionary and church planter in Thailand. Since he’s been in Abilene, he’s joined the chorus of professors describing the postmodern shift, but he alone seems to think that such shifts might at all change how and what church looks like.

The class was very engaging, and also very affirming. It helped me think through some of the principles of thought in postmodernity (reading philosophers like Derrida, Foucault, Caputo, etc) and then talking about what that might mean for communities of faith. We looked at churches trying to explore a post-foundationalist theology…all very heady, but also very interesting stuff.

One big take away was an axis continuum Flanders showed us from Mary Douglas. It looked something like this:

Grid and Group Theory:

The two axes, Group, and Grid, show the progress of institutions (which was defined as a coordinating group of any kind) as growing inevitably and increasingly higher in “Grid”. The higher you go in Grid, the more structure and levels of authority there are. The rules and roles are more clearly defined. The other axis, Group describes the degree to which the collective controls the individual and degree to which people are bonded to particular social units - the sense of “family” the group feels.

Church examples of each: Hierarchy (Catholic Church), Authoritarian (Roman Religion; Emperor is God), Individualism (consumerist mega-church Christianity), and Egalitarianism (Quakers).

At first I wasn’t sure how I felt about this chart. Hearing that communities, the longer they are together, always move “up grid” and wake up one day a huge franchised corporation did not settle well with me. But is it possible to be meaningful, to make a difference that matters, while not selling your soul? Where do you find the balance so that lives can be changed, while remaining as structurally flat as possible to keep remain centered on mission and people rather than on preserving the institution.

What if instead of a chain of command (a la Roman Catholic Church), there was a web of relationships. Individuals networked together for the common good. Organic, family-style churches networked together as a coalition in a local context. Servant leaders of these church networks that network together to work as a resource to one another and provide training for new leaders that focus on a region. As church networks grow, is this a potential way to go “up grid” without having to distribute power to individuals, but rather power to communities? What am I missing here? I’d love to hear your thoughts.