A Gathering of Angels . . . And
A Time To Dance
Dear Friends,
The letter speaks for itself. My thanks to Paul & Lori Byerly, Tony & Felicity Dale and everyone who made my
trip to
Blessings,
Maurice
I could
tell from the outset that this newsletter was going to be as challenging to
write as it was to experience. I spent the best part of last week at a
"listening" gathering in
This is where it gets
"interesting." What none of us understood or suspected or heard at
the outset, was that we were entering into a journey that had less to do with
"structures" and more to do with "values". You see, house
church isn’t so much about structure as it is about values. It isn’t about
where we meet; it is about the values of genuine Christian community that we
express when we do meet. Values change structures, and structures express values.
Change the values of a community (i.e., an ekklesia)
and its structure (such as 5-fold ministry, elders, deacons
- all aspects of leadership) will also change. That is why Bill Beckham is so
adamant: "You never change a structure until you change a value. We do
not transplant systems and structures. We transplant values and life."
Now this is one of those
stories which is best told by giving you the "punchline" in advance, and then explaining how we got
there. But let me first offer a caveat: Everyone takes something different away
from this kind of an experience. People who were present these three days will
read this e-mail and wonder why I didn’t mention . . . (fill in the blank
here). Answer: Because each of us was touched or impressed by something
different. What you are receiving is what Maurice took away from this time and
how I have processed this message during the intervening days. I dont
claim to "have it all," but I do hope that the little parts I
received were genuine. So, lets begin.
The Journey Into Community Begins
Its
well-nigh impossible to get 40 "Type-A" ministry leaders in a room
without people wanting to talk about their ministries and the agendas which
they brought with them. Yes, even at a "listening" conference. Lets face it. We
all have agendas - aspects of our calling and ministry which are near and dear
to us. We all subconsciously engage in "ministry projection," that
tendency to transfer the perceived importance of our ministry to other people
("This is my ministry, and I think it should be your ministry,
too!").
We have our agendas . . .
and God has His! What we discovered last week was (for those of you who were
wondering, heres the punchline) that God’s
agenda was to move us from being a house church "movement" to being a
house church "community"; from a people of
"pseudo-community" to an ekklesia
of "genuine community" by imparting to us a new (but "old")
set of values. And those values, when fully "imbibed" would change us
and our house churches forever, and make us a people whom God could use to
"turn the world upside-down."
Because Scott Peck’s
understanding of the journey into genuine community became very meaningful to
me in understanding what unfolded during these three days (although the Holy
Spirit didnt open my own eyes to see what was
happening until the morning of the second day) I want to share a few quotes
which help to set the stage for and explain this journey:
"If we are going to
use the word [community] meaningfully we must restrict it to a group of individuals
who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose
relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed
some significant commitment to rejoice together, mourn together and to
delight in each other and to make others conditions our own." Dr. M. Scott Peck, The Different Drum
I have no doubt that the
40-plus house church leaders who descended upon the Dales home on
Wednesday morning would have regarded themselves as a "community" -
had anyone had the audacity to ask or question us on the topic. After all,
were house church leaders for heavens sake - we have a
corner on the whole "community" thing. Right?
But after spending roughly an hour praying and "listening," what came
next quickly demonstrated that genuine community was elusive at best. The
remainder of the day was spent not listening to God, but listening to ourselves
talk about ourselves and our ministries (and mind you, I was as
"guilty" as anyone in the room on this score!). And don’t get me wrong.
It was great talk by people engaged in significant ministry
around the world. For example, here’s how to identify a false apostle: When you
look at what he has built, is he in the foundation (invisible) or on the roof
(very visible). Wow! There go most of the "apostolic" ministries in
my city! That was just one nugget pulled from this "talk". There was
more: "The issue isn’t structure; the issue is passion and values"
and "Structure must give way to vision, not the other way around."
In the span of five minutes Wolfgang Simson
shared eight (yep, eight) characteristics of Apostolic ministry that I still
havent fully digested, such as "Apostles give the sense that the
impossible is possible." (Hey, there are 7 more where that came from,
and Wolf said he was only getting started!). This is how the remainder of the
day unfolded. Soon, the counselors were counseling, the teachers were teaching,
the apostles were being, well, apostolic and the ministry
"alpha-males" were clearly in control of the day. The problem here
wasn’t that we were being bored by trivia. It was all great stuff, but it
wasn’t why we had come. We had spent the day engaging in what Scott Peck refers
to as "pseudo-community." We were just better at it than most,
because we have the ability to baptize and spiritualize it!
"The first response
of a group in seeking to form a community is most often to try to fake it. The
By the close of the first
day we were fully engaged in "pseudo-community." While great stuff
was being shared, we were missing the point of why we had come in the first
place, and an underlying frustration and tension was building.
"The essential
dynamic of pseudo community is conflict avoidance. The absence of conflict in a
group is not by itself diagnostic. Genuine community may experience lovely and
sometimes lengthy periods free from conflict. But that is because they have
learned how to deal with conflict rather than avoid it. Pseudo-community is
conflict-avoiding; true community is conflict-resolving." - Peck
As I told my wife when I
called home later that evening, "Its been great, but we haven’t
spent any time listening. We’ve spent the whole time talking." We had
"successfully" avoided conflict, but we had set ourselves up for the
chaos which would characterize our time together the following day. I
discovered later that several key leaders had actually considered catching an
early plane home after the first day. This wasn’t what they had interrupted
their busy schedules to come for. I understood and shared their sense of
frustration. But even in the midst of this furtive exercise in
"pseudo-community" God had still spoken. Wolfgang shared that he
sensed God desiring to move us from "independence" to
"dependency". And Marilyn shared that she saw a picture of a baby
that was partially born from the waist up (hinting that God wanted to complete
that birth during our time together. Hmmm.) God was in
fact casting pearls before us (nope, dont go there) but it would take
another day of chaos before we would begin to string them together.
A Journey Into Chaos
"Chaos is not just
a state, it is an essential part of the process of
community development. Consequently, unlike pseudo-community, it does not
simply go away as soon as the group becomes aware of it."
"In the stage of
chaos individual differences are, unlike those in pseudo-community, right out
in the open. Only now, instead of trying to hide or ignore them, the group is
attempting to obliterate them. Underlying [these] attempts to heal and convert
is not so much the motive of love as the motive to make everyone normal -
and the motive to win as the
"Christian chaos"
is an interesting phenomenon to watch. What often sets us apart from the
unbeliever when it comes to resolving chaos is not our faith, but the seemingly
"spiritual" nature of our attempts to "heal, convert &
normalize". When in doubt, act spiritual. Our
second day (Thursday) began with frustration and "Christian chaos".
The effort to "heal, convert & normalize" came it several forms.
First, it was suggested that we all pray in the same way by praying aloud
("in unison") while walking about. After this exercise John White
(house church coach from
"It is true that
organization is a solution to chaos. Indeed, that is the primary reason for
organization: to minimize chaos. The trouble is, however, that organization and
community are also incompatible . . . . But an organization is able to nurture
a measure of community within itself only to the extent that it is willing to
risk or tolerate a certain lack of structure. As long as the goal is
community-building, organization as an attempted solution to chaos is an
unworkable solution."
It was announced that we
would now break into three small groups to discuss what we had
"heard" so far. As we broke up, Wolf, who was sitting beside Eric and
behind me, handed me the walking stick and said, "This is for you.
Meditate on this." I had already been struck by the prophetic word and
sensed that God was telling all of us what He wanted to do and why we were
really there. The question was, would we listen?
Our small group was
facilitated by John White (along with Mike Steele) of DAWN ministries. Others
in our group included Mike & Marilyn Philips (marriage ministry), Abraham
& Mareke Meulenberg
from
After a break for lunch we
reassembled to hear reports from the various groups. I was called out of the
room for a video-taping session (virtually everyone at the gathering was subjected
to this torture, part of a video project that House2House is working on in
conjunction with George Barna). I missed most of the
group reports, including a "conference call" with Bob Jones (yep, the
prophetic guy from
The day ended with all of
us going back to our small groups in what I could only interpret as a hope that
the chaos would somehow be organized and resolved there. When our group
gathered under Johns (and Mike’s) leadership, John guided the discussion
toward answering a question: "Who have we not heard from that we want
to hear from?" This question and the discussion which followed led us
to a new place. Mareke, from
That evening, after dinner,
I phoned my wife to give her an update as to what was going on (our house
church intercessors back home were praying for our time). I told Gale that this
was the "most successful failure" I had ever been a part of!
Successful in that there was much fruitful discussion
by gifted people. But a failure because we seemed to have
missed the purpose for which we had come . . . to listen and hear from God.
But that was about to change.
The Journey Into Emptiness . . . And Beyond
Scott Peck gives four steps
on the journey to genuine community: 1) Pseudo-community; 2) Chaos; 3)
Emptiness and 4) Genuine Community. We had experienced the first two, and God
in His faithfulness was about to lead us through the third and into the fourth.
But there was still work to be done.
The next morning I was
blessed to spend time over breakfast with Wolfgang Simson,
Neil Gamble, Eric Reber and Hamilton Filmalter (an amazing blind healing evangelist from
When the morning session
began something happened that I was not expecting (or at least "Mr.
Ed" hadn’t prepared me for it). Neil Gamble began to wash the feet of a
couple who had come to the conference at his invitation. Now, mind you, I think
Christians have several bad "religious" habits. And when a meeting
gets slow they usually engage in one of these bad habits. One of those habits
is to break out a guitar and begin singing. Fortunately, no one brought a
guitar (or if they did, they were wise enough to keep it out of sight). But
another of those religious bad habits is "foot washing". I usually
groan (sometimes audibly) and get nervous whenever the bowl & towel come
out. "Not again," I often mutter to myself. But not
this time. This was different. It was the real thing. Neil was genuinely
broken and obeying what God had told him to do. As he washed this couple’s feet
Neil repented and asked forgiveness for having invited them to come to a
gathering which had not been what he had promised it to be.
This was a moment of
"quiet thunder" when God spoke into our gathering and changed the
whole atmosphere of the meeting. Through his broken obedience Neil brought the
entire group into a place of "emptiness," that place wherein chaos is
stilled as everyone abandons their own agendas and expectations. In biblical
terms, it is the obedience of the broken heart that is willing to yield up its
own desires and plans in order to embrace whatever God would have them do.
The gathering now shifted
gears dramatically. Tony Dale invited John White to facilitate and coach us for
the remainder of our time together (great move!). John began asking the
question which our small group had pondered the previous day: "Who have
we not heard from that we want to hear from?" That’s when we heard
from Nina who shared that she didnt
feel she had anything worth sharing that anyone would want to hear. She said
that she would have left the conference feeling enriched by all she had heard
and experienced, but we pointed out to her that we as a body would NOT have
been enriched if she hadnt
shared. Next, someone (John?) observed that all of the Type-A leaders (people
with lots to share and no hesitancy in doing so) were sitting in the front
rows, while others, particularly the women, were sitting in the back rows. As
we took a brief break John suggested that when we re-convened we should
re-arrange our seating to reflect and accommodate those who had not yet shared.
When we re-convened after the break it was clear that something had happened. Dominant
individuals had taken a back seat. The front seats were now occupied by women
(primarily) who had not felt free to share before. In what followed God gave us
a practical illustration of what Francis Schaeffer meant 25 years ago when he
wrote that in the
We ended our time by
calling the women into the center of the room. There was repentance for having
excluded them in the life and ministry of the church. The women gathered around
and clutched the walking stick inscribed with Acts 17:6 (yep, it was back at
the center of things!). We as a body prayed and declared that the body of
Christ would no longer be hemiplegic (half a body),
but would now be a body with two legs that could function as God ordained.
As God had revealed to Neil
Gamble in the original vision for this gathering, He did indeed impart
something corporately, a fresh understanding of the nature of genuine
community, and a fresh appreciation of the importance of honoring everyone in
our house church community - from the "least" to the
"greatest" (if we can even use such adjectives in this context). In
the process we "heard" from God that He was stringing together pearls
of great value into a necklace of surpassing worth in which Jesus takes the
prominent position and arranges His people in an order of His unique design. I
believe that if we as a house church community fully "imbibe" this
understanding and begin to walk in it consistently, we will expose the lie of
pseudo-community that characterizes most "church" gatherings (even
Peck states that most churches represent pseudo-community) and offer to
believers and non-believers alike a model of authentic community, a safe place
where everyone is equally valued because there are "No Little People"
and where they can begin to touch and taste the powers of the Age to Come.
Welcome to the
As I have written before,
the