What if the church had no doors?

What if the church had no doors?

I want to tell you the story of why Kim and I are following God and trying to create this new way of doing church called Mosaic Niagara. 

As I reflect back on my years in ministry, I realize that I have spent a lot of time and energy trying to get people who don’t yet know Jesus in through the door of the church.  In the churches that I have lead, we have done advertising, we have hosted carnivals, breakfasts and all kind of other outreach events to try and get people in through the doors of the church.

 

I’ve been at many different kind of evangelism training conferences and seminars trying to figure out how to do that and then how to evangelize people once they are in.  We have done all this in the hopes that once we get people in the front door of the church, that they will somehow give their lives to Jesus and find relationship with God. 

 

On occasion, that has worked.  But mostly it hasn’t.

 

Sure, you will get a few people out to a breakfast or a carnival or a special service at Christmas or Easter.  And maybe you will have a few polite conversations.  But largely, it hasn’t brought people to church and certainly hasn’t brought them to Jesus.  And my experience has been that as our culture slips more and more into post-modernism and post-Christendom, getting people inside the doors of the church is getting more difficult.  Because traditional church – that is church the way we have been doing it for decades – isn’t working for an increasing number of people.

 

Now don’t hear what I’m not saying.  I am not saying that we need to abandon ship and completely throw out the way we have been doing church.  Traditional church still works for some people.  And, in a traditional church model, we are still able to do a decent job of the discipleship side of the coin.

 

But it isn’t working well when it comes to the other side of the coin – in helping people who don’t yet know Jesus to come to faith.  All of this was just starting to dawn on me when I was still pastor at Living Water Fellowship in New Hamburg. 

 

With that church and a number of other churches, Kim and I began an intentional learning community through the INNOVATE called ReLearning Community.  That journey with began to significantly change the way that we think about disciple-making.  Actually, for me, it actually started a bit before ReLearning Community.  I somehow got a copy of the book Building a Discipling Culture by Mike Breen of 3DM.  And as I read it, it really resonated with me.

 

At that time, I had been at Living Water for about 9 years and was tired.  I was tired of all the hard work of managing a church and trying to help it to be a growing church making a difference in the community.  I was feeling like maybe it was time for a change.  Something new.  I remember sharing this with our then Mission Minister, Brian Bauman.  He encouraged me to take more time to think and pray about it.

 

As I did that over the next couple of months, the word “re-tool” came to my mind.  And it kept coming.  A number of years before this, I had worked at a glass factory that made various shapes of glass windows for buildings and cars. When it was time to start a new part, we had to change the set up of the machine.  We had to re-tool.  Because the way the machine was set up, wouldn’t produce the results that we were looking for.

 

That became a powerful metaphor for me personally.  Maybe what I needed wasn’t a new job but was to be re-tooled for the task ahead. Because the old tools weren’t doing the job.

 

So, I signed on to the 2 year journey that was ReLearning Community with a team from Living Water.  It a great experience – challenging, stretching and encouraging.

 

After the two years, Kim and I decided that it was time for us to move on from Living Water after almost 12 years and we moved our family from New Hamburg to Drayton where I started as lead pastor at Community Mennonite Fellowship.  At CMF, we participated in the 2 year ReLearning Community process a second time with a team from that church.

 

During this time, a realization began to dawn on me.  I began to see how much of my time and energy as a pastor went into thing that weren’t making disciples of Jesus.  Things like creating an attractive Sunday morning experience for people, crafting sermons, creating and maintaining programs in the church. 

 

I also was realizing how much time, money and energy other people in the church were putting into things that weren’t making disciples.  Serving on committees, paying for and maintaining a building.  People are already so busy doing church stuff but if we were to apply the ReLearning Community learnings, we would be asking them to do more.

 

Looking back, I call this realization a time of “holy dissatisfaction”.  Something needed to change.  So Kim and I both started thinking about what it might look like to do church differently.  More like the missional community or family on mission model that was being talked about at ReLearning Community.  What if, instead of trying to add those to what we were already doing for church, we were able to focus simply on making disciples the way Jesus did – through creating little family on mission groups?

 

What if instead of trying to get people in the doors of the church to reach them, the church had no doors?  What if we were the church going to them?

 

The idea excited us but it was also terrifying for someone who has always taken their salary and made a living from being a church pastor.  But over the course of a couple of years, we knew that this was what God was calling us to.

 

So I told our church Leadership Team about what we felt God calling us to.  They were sad but gracious and understood that this really was who we were and what God was calling us to.

 

Then we announced to the congregation that we were leaving.  That was tough.  The people at CMF are wonderful people.  I enjoyed working with them in ministry.  I had to make it clear that we weren’t leaving because of any problem.  In fact, Kim and I had often talked about how I thought I could easily continue there until it was time to retire.  But God was calling us to something different.

 

I want to make it clear again, that I am not saying that we need to abandon traditional church completely.  What Kim and I are doing comes out of our conviction that we need to add new forms of doing church that can be more intentionally focused on disciple-making.

 

So that is what we are just starting to do now.  We sold our house in Drayton and bought a house in Welland.  Neither of us had a job to go to when our jobs in Drayton were done.  We moved in June but I continued to pastor CMF until the end of October.  I would commute a couple of times a week and work remotely for the rest of the time.

 

So right now, we are simply trying to establish our lives here.  To get settled into the community.  Kim is trying to get onto the supply teacher list for the Niagara board.  I am driving school bus and working as an interim pastor for Kingsfield-Zurich Mennonite Church.  We are trying to meet people, get to know our neighbours and see who God puts into our lives.

 

The church that we envision creating will be essentially smaller missional community type groups.  We hope to start with one but for that group to grow and for other groups to emerge.  We envision each of the groups to develop uniquely.  But that they will be aware that they are part of something bigger – a network of groups.

 

The focus of the groups will be to live life on life with each other and with those in our spheres of influence.  The goal will not be to create a large Sunday morning gathering or to ever have a building or to have programs or committees or to ever need to pay a pastor’s salary.  Because of those things, it will be able to be much more intentionally focussed on disciple-making.

 

It will be a church that is incarnational and goes to where people are rather than trying to attract people to us and our stuff.

 

It will be a church without doors.