A couple months back, my family and I were traveling across the Southwest U.S. to several college campuses, helping to launch the Wilder Project with friends from 24-7 Prayer and WYWAM. I was able to spend a day in a prayer room in the center of a nondescript complex – the international headquarters of an organization that sends Jesus-followers into some of the most difficult places in the Middle East and North Africa to start Jesus Communities.<\/p>\n
Everything in the prayer room was set in Middle Eastern decor. From the moment I walked into the prayer room, I began weeping. I began reading prayer requests from field workers, written in a notebook in the corner of the room. I began praying for a family who was asking for prayer: \u201cLast week, a bomb exploded a few blocks away from us. Militants are looking for Christians in the area. Pray that we will not be afraid and that our children will not be aware of the danger around them.\u201d<\/p>\n
While I was reading this account from a missionary family, I realized that hundreds of thousands of international students, including Muslims, walk on our university campuses, where their biggest regret upon leaving America is often that they didn\u2019t get to build a close friendship with an American.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not ashamed of the gospel. But I am saddened by how little it seems to be going forth among the unchurched in the West.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s a point I\u2019d like to get across that I\u2019m learning — preaching the gospel in Christian ministry meetings and church gatherings is not the same as communicating the gospel to non-Christians in our culture. No matter how hard we preach, if we surround ourselves with cultural barriers and extrabiblical requirements, we limit the effectiveness of the gospel simply by preventing people from hearing it.<\/p>\n
Do most people have to come to a formal meeting prior in order to hear the gospel? When John Wesley went to the fields and coal mines, one of the criticisms against him was that that he wasn’t preaching in a pulpit. Today, when most of our energy revolves around making arrangements for programs and weekly gatherings, I believe we\u2019re neglecting to communicate the gospel to people who need to hear it most. Jesus said, “Healthy people don’t need a doctor, sick people do. I came to call sinners.” Jesus said, \u201cGo into all the world and preach the good news.\u201d We\u2019re sometimes content to sit in ministry meetings that 95% of the lost will never come to — when the Lord has told us to go. I’m not saying having places to gather and worship aren’t important. But I think we’re dangerously out of balance in terms of where we prioritize our time and efforts. We have more full-time campus ministers on our college campuses in America than anywhere in the world. Yet, after a traveling tour of almost 6,000 miles the last couple months, I\u2019m shocked at how many students we met on college campuses who said they\u2019d never heard the story of why Jesus came to earth.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The “Go and tell” good news<\/p>\n
The term \u201capostle\u201d has been largely misused in the West. People are afraid to use the term. \u201cApostle\u201d signifies one who is \u201csent out.\u201d I believe the apostolic aspect of Christianity in the West has been almost completely forgotten, or at least buried beneath a cultural traditions that – though not wrong in and of themselves — are extra-Biblical. We rarely release control enough to send out small teams to travel, preach the gospel, and start new communities of faith that result from the evangelism. It\u2019s too risky. Heresy might occur. It doesn\u2019t generate income to sustain local churches as we know them. It doesn\u2019t fit our understanding for how churches are supposed to grow.<\/p>\n
One of the most successful and expansive missionary movements in history – the Jesuits – was pioneered by St. Ignatius of Loyola. He was an oddball in his day. St. Ignatius was weird. He once walked barefoot from Spain to Jerusalem, thinking this was a way to encounter God. He got deported quickly. But he was still hungry to see God do something significant through his life. The monastic orders of his day were largely secluded and had very little view of the primacy of Christian missions. In this environment, St. Ignatius believed that you must \u201cpray as you go\u201d. Across the Himalayas, on three year ocean voyages, across the Western Frontier of the Americas, through the Amazonian river basin — Jesuit missionaries inspired by Loyola and his team married prayer, missions, and an adventurous spirit together in a way not seen since, perhaps, St. Patrick traveled throughout Ireland bringing the gospel to the Celts in the 5th Century. Jesuits went into China a hundred years before Hudson Taylor. Matteo Ricci died in China after leading 2,000 Chinese to Christ – in a land known for extreme xenophobia. Jesuit missionaries actually wrote home that the Chinese wouldn\u2019t adapt well to worshiping in traditional cathedrals. They believed they would want to worship in houses. Ricci paved the way for others.<\/p>\n
I believe we must start thinking apostolically \u00a0in the West again and especially on college campuses. The Muslims on your campus can\u2019t join your campus ministry. I am informed by cultural experts that word would spread around the Muslim community and, in many cases, word would get back home and they would be shamed and forced back home. Not only that, but we worship the way Westerners like to. We do church in a Western style. Is there a way to reach people with the gospel and start new churches completely and culturally distinct from the local churches we have now? There must be, or there is little hope for spiritual awakening in our culture. If there is not a new church planting movement in North America, we may quickly follow in the steps of post-Christendom Europe.<\/p>\n
I realize passion must be expressed in love. We all need community. We all need a place to call home and people around us that we feel comfortable with who we can worship with. It\u2019s normal to build churches that reflect our culture. But the last two years I cannot escape this question that constantly lays on me like a coat:<\/p>\n
\u201cWho will do church for the pagans\u201d (non-Christians)?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Looking at the Church or The City? <\/strong><\/p>\n In the West, we\u2019ve become experts at worship services. We\u2019ve become experts in producing conferences. Many of our churches grow because we\u2019ve learned to implement better marketing practices than smaller churches. God uses all these things. The gospel still goes forth though and people do come to faith in Christ. But we have a ridiculous standard of success for church growth in the West — we look at the church rather than the city. We look at the growth of our individual church community, rather than the corporate expression of the \u201cChurch\u201d in our city. The percentage of Christians in our city can decline year after year, but if our individual church is growing, we figure we must be doing it right. Then, to further validate one particular model for church growth, people write books on how to mimic the strategies implemented by the growing church.<\/p>\n Marketing and advertising and learning from the business world isn\u2019t bad. I think we should maintain a posture of learning from everything. I love Jim Collins (Good To Great, etc). I use marketing and advertising for Christian events we produce. I love big celebrations and large gatherings to worship as much as the next person. However, if you spend most of your time around Christians and ministry events, your view of the world often will be formed in ignorance to the cultures and people around you.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a harsh word for some of us: Some of us need to go out from our prayer meetings and go obey what God has already told us to do. Some of us need to leave our worship gatherings and go bring worship where there is no worship. Some of us need to leave \u201cthe ministry\u201d and start following Jesus to become fishers of men.<\/p>\n Go meet international students on your campus. Walk up and introduce yourself and welcome them to your city. Tell them you\u2019re glad they are here. Go befriend the ethnic minority family on your street who everybody smiles at politely but stops short of inviting to dinner. Go make a Muslim friend. Share a meal with them. Gather with Muslims for a meal and to discuss a story about Jesus together. Did you know the Koran instructs Muslims to read the stories of Jesus? Ask for their help translating a simple worship song into Arabic, or Farsi, or whatever language they speak.<\/p>\n Demographers predict that, given current trends, white people will become a minority in America in the next fifty years. (See Jenkins, The Next Christendom). Yet, most church growth strategies I see are geared for Westerners who are at least open to attending a congregational church. We still do church with the subtle ethnocentric views that made our efforts to bring the gospel to Native Americans such an abysmal failure: We communicate (unintentionally perhaps), \u201cYou can come follow Jesus, as long as you do church like us, worship like us, and look like us.\u201d We\u2019ve stopped giving the gospel away as a gift by requiring adaptation of a Western model of church to be a requirement for Christians to endorse you as a follower of Jesus.<\/p>\n Near many of us, there are pockets of culturally distinct people who need culturally distinct expressions of worship and culturally unique ways for leading churches. This is one reason I love the idea of planting organic churches — they are a way to start culturally flexible forms of indigenous-led churches. They can grow into larger churches, buy a building, and pay their leaders down the road if they wish. But let\u2019s believe for the start of thousands and thousands of new \u201cbaby\u201d churches in the culturally unique pockets of people around North America.<\/p>\n If there were a couple truths I could live and die for, here would be two of them:<\/p>\n 1) The gospel is powerful, not our Christian culture<\/strong>. It\u2019s human nature to \u201cdo\u201d church only in the cultural forms with which we\u2019re most familiar. It takes humility and spirit-given wisdom to give the gospel away and nurture new cultural forms of worship and ways of leading church communities. See Acts 15 for a great debate on whether the early church would allow different cultural expressions of church in other cities. We would do well to heed their example today.<\/p>\n If you talk about Jesus, things happen. We\u2019ve got to rediscover the ancient apostolic roots of our Christian movement by relearning how to start churches in the West that are faithful to the gospel, but culturally distinct.<\/p>\n 2) Universities are a mission field<\/strong>. They are the most strategic mission field in the world. In one square mile, you can reach the future leaders of America and almost every country on earth (though certainly not every ethnic group). Universities require prayer, creativity, self-sacrifice, and apostolic\/missionary strategy as much as strategizing to go to an unreached people group on the other side of the planet. They also require a willingness to hold loosely our cultural forms of doing church and adopt an apostolic mindset, constantly asking questions like, \u201cWhat would it look like for an indigenous, lay-led expression of the church look like here?\u201d \u201cWhat would it take for the gospel to rapidly spread and bring transformation on campus?\u201d<\/em> Because universities are a constantly-changing, transitional, temporary community, it also requires asking these questions year after year.<\/p>\n I, and a growing network of friends, believe it\u2019s strategic to bring new strategies alongside local church and parachurch models to call for temporary, simple expressions of church that can be planted on campus and led by students. It\u2019s not hard to find criticism of the student church movement, or the idea of planting student-led organic churches on college campuses. In most cases, they don\u2019t last, at least in terms of an ongoing established congregation that identifies with a name or denomination or geographic location. What\u2019s hard for our brothers and sisters in Christ of a different paradigm to understand is, \u201cThey\u2019re not supposed to.\u201d<\/p>\n Student churches are a way to \u201cseed\u201d the gospel into a campus year after year in a continual cycle of death and rebirth. When the church \u201cdies\u201d it grows into new ones. One spreads overseas. Two new ones start in two new dorm floors on campus. New disciples are made. Expressions of church are brought into the areas students do life. Why do we call them \u201cchurches\u201d as opposed to Bible studies? Because we want students all over the nation to go all over the world with the following precepts:\u2028\u2028<\/p>\n \u201cAnyone can start a church\u201d and \u201cYou can start churches anywhere.\u201d <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n These two principles have become tenents of our movement. Universities are a key vehicle in God\u2019s plan to fill every corner of the earth with worshipers in every ethnic group. We hope for a reformation in our thinking so that churches and campus ministries everywhere will embrace their potential to start new simple church communities year to year on campuses, that can still connect relationally and be served by their local church or ministry.<\/p>\n My heart breaks when I read the literature about the attrition rate of teen students who attend Christian youth groups, then fall away from the faith in college. Is this the kind of leadership we\u2019re raising in the next generation? I have a book on my college written to Christian teens: \u201cHow to Survive Spiritually in College.\u201d I\u2019m all for teaching kids how to protect their faith and be on guard against backsliding but I think, as the people of God in the world, we have a lot more potential than we\u2019re living up to.<\/p>\n Surviving or Sent? <\/strong><\/p>\n I started asking a different question: \u201cWhat if we started EQUIPPING and SENDING students to secular colleges, rather than just trying to get them to SURVIVE? Christian students can literally become student missionaries to their campus if they adopt this apostolic mindset. I started giving this challenge to young people with a heart for the nations:<\/p>\n Do you want to see God transform the nations? I challenge you to start by giving 4 years of your life to missions – by going as a student church planter to a secular college campus. You can reach the nations as a cross-cultural student missionary on your campus. <\/em><\/p>\n I believe a new student missions movement has begun. But this movement is not going to look like what we might think. It may start on universities but it will not end there. It\u2019s gonna be people traveling to pioneer micro-enterprise projects in Central Africa, starting simple churches along the way, while teaching men and women to live out kingdom values in business. It will be people planting simple churches in economic sectors, teaching businesspeople in the high rises of Hong Kong, Taipai, and Tokyo that they can encounter Jesus\u2019 presence in a temporary prayer room set up in an office and an informal meeting with a handful of others to encourage one another to follow Jesus\u2019 teachings. It will be college students and professors planting simple churches on college campuses around the world. Yes, it will be full-time vocational missionaries and ministers, too. But this will not be the principle way of funding the church plants around the world. Like in Acts 11:20, they will be Antioch churches started by people who we don\u2019t even know by name. \u201cBut some of the believers…\u201d<\/p>\n Speaking of the Antioch Church in Acts, did you ever realize that this missions-sending epicenter of the Mediterranean world was started by people whose names we don\u2019t even know – \u201csome of the believers?\u201d Paul and Barnabus later came to strengthen it and build it up. But it was started by people who we don\u2019t even know by name. I am believing to see an apostolic move of God where churches start this way all over the place. There\u2019s a place for professional ministers (I am one), but I\u2019ve come to fully believe that our role is actually to equip others to start and lead churches (do the work of ministry).<\/p>\n \u201cAnyone can start a church. You can start churches anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n “Lord, I pray for the gospel to go forth in power on college campuses. From there, may your church grow on every campus and every nation on earth.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A couple months back, my family and I were traveling across the Southwest U.S. to several college campuses, helping to launch the Wilder Project with friends from 24-7 Prayer and WYWAM. I was able to spend a day in a prayer room in the center of a nondescript complex – the international headquarters of an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[247,251,13],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n