Something More – Moving Beyond Knowledge Acquisition

Posted on Oct 16, 2011 in The Church | 4 comments

If you have followed this blog for any period of time, you know that I started a non-profit called Embrace Richmond. The mission of Embrace is to strengthen under-resourced communities by empowering community based leaders and engaging people of faith in works of service.  In other words, we seek to transform communities from the inside out by partnering community leaders with congregational volunteers.  We call these community based leaders, “Street Saints” and those offering to support them, “Encouragers.”

It is our belief that God has provide leadership in every community, no matter how distressed the community may appear from the outside.  However, these future leaders are often isolated and lack the support they need to grow, thus the need for congregational partners and “encouragers.”

My greatest hope is that the church universal will more fully embrace Ephesians 4:11-12, “The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry.”

This passage says to me that the role of the vocational minister is to equip the saints so that they can do “works of ministry” or “works of service” as it is translated elsewhere. The word “saints” in this passage is used very broadly to mean all of God’s people.  As I shared in my post titled “Disciples in the church?,”  I have begun to think that many churches don’t really want disciples.  Disciples are saints who are doing works of service.  Works of service are often outside the church.

Churches that are serious about developing disciples must not only equip them but also release them, as Sue Mallory says in her book “The Equipping Church”,

“The church exists to equip people in order to release them back into the world, grounded in truth and in genuine community, “dangerous” for the cause of the gospel.”

Mallory affirms what I have seen over and over again in various congregations that say they want to be more missional but who emphasize “knowledge acquisition.”  She writes,

“If the first two or three steps of an intentional growth path emphasize the acquisition of knowledge, they [churches] have much less success in later steps when they ask people to make a commitment to changes in lifestyle, in actions, or in stewardship of their resources.  Classroom programs are much easier to organize, and a church can more easily develop leaders for small group programs that focus on interactive teaching.  Yet, starting with a knowledge priority, the discipleship process can create an early expectation that the crux of discipleship is knowledge acquisition.”

I think anyone who has been in the church for any period of time has seen this reality.  When I first came to faith at age 26, I was hungry to live “the way” of Jesus.  When I asked what the path looked like, I was told to go to bible study. At the end of the first bible study, I was encouraged to enroll in another, then another, then another.  I spent 5 years in Bible Study Fellowship.  When I looked around at the hundreds of women in the program, they all saw attending church and bible study as “the way.”  Somehow we have turned the vehicle that is supposed to lead us toward “the way” into “the way.”  In many churches we emphasize attendance at church functions more than we emphasize works of service in the world.   After years in the bible study focused setting, I began seeking “something more.”

I was hopeful about the “missional church movement” because it promised to break us out of this long established mode of doing church.  Sadly, the term has been hi-jacked and become just a trendy label slapped on anything new.  While many people see what Sue Mallory articulates, few are willing to make the fundamental structural changes necessary to correct the current “knowledge acquisition” model. Many are asking “What does that look like?”  As I shared in my post “Following the Leader”, I think the answer is found in growing disciples the way Jesus did.

The truth is, the Jesus way is far more difficult.  It involves investing in a small number of “saints” whom you then “release” into the world.  It does not look anything like the traditional church where people come and are fed and just get fatter and fatter, year after year.  It is a light weight, mobile, fluid, organic structure that flows in response to a spiritual force and not according to a detailed rigid strategic plan.  It is messy, unpredictable and not easily measured.  It flies in the face of all our culturally constructed ideas of what a successful church looks like.

For the past month, I have been meeting with a dynamic, creative group of Christian educators who are trying to figure out how to build equipping structures that actually release people into the world to do relational ministry across cultural boundaries.  While many have given up on the traditional church, this group believes parallel structures can be developed that can mobilize the sleeping giant we call the traditional church, or at least those within the walls of the church who are “seeking something more.”

I still can’t define exactly what this is going to look like and it will likely look different in different context. We have representation in the group of suburban and urban, large and small, Baptist, Presbyterian and Methodist denominations.  Our hope is to develop a process for equipping that balances “knowledge acquisition”, “missional engagement” and “Spiritual Practices.”  As our group has been sharing, these common threads have emerged:

1. A shared understanding that for us “missional” will mean engaging in real, authentic relationships across culturally constructed boundaries of race and class for the purpose of building community within the group and in the community itself.
2. The goal of our missional engagement is two-fold – the personal growth of all those who participate and the strengthening of a particular community around a particular resident initiated project or initiative.
3. A shared recognition that few in our culture value or have experienced authentic community. Thus we will need to instill a high value on authentic relationships and community that are born out of presence and a willingness to be vulnerable and authentic with other human beings.  This will best be established through modeling.
4. We all agreed that community is best formed in groups of 4-8 who have a shared passion and who are all willing to admit their own brokenness and desire to grow from the experience.
5. Our desire is that the process of equipping and engaging in missional experiences be a vehicle for discipleship that is heavily steeped in the spiritual practices of theological reflection and contemplation.  We must build the expectation that one will encounter God in the experience and make space for sharing what God is showing us in the journey.

With these common threads having been established, I am excited to see where God takes us from here!

If you are seeking “something more” than mere “knowledge acquisition” in your spiritual journey and think you might like to be a part of something like this, please let me know and I will connect you to one of these emerging conversations.  Some of our partners will be working with us in Hillside but others will be working in communities that their congregations have an established relationship with.  You just have to be hungry for something more and be open to seeing God in some unexpected places.

Please keep this group of ministers in your thoughts and prayers.  Pray God frees us from traditional structures enough to imagine something new that will result in the fundamental changes that are needed to birth a dynamic, spirit led, truly missional expression of ministry that can work in synergy with the traditional church.