A Journey to the Source of the Great River

Here a post from my prayer letter in September 2008...

The rain falls heavily on Ethiopia in September. As the flood waters wash down the mountains and through the city streets of Addis Ababa, they gather to form the Nile. Heading north into the vast Sahara Desert this great river shapes, defines, and brings life to the African landscape.

As I’ve been thinking through my time spent in Ethiopia, the image that keeps coming back to my mind is a river. A deep, powerful river that transforms the land wherever it flows. I don’t think that I can describe my trip without this image. It seems strange that I only spent 10 days in Africa because I feel like in that short time I have been swept away into something greater than myself, something overpowering. I honestly believe that this great river is changing me, shaping me, defining me, and bringing new life.

So what exactly have I stepped into? What is this Great River that has had such an impact on my life? I’m not sure that I fully understand it myself, and I’m nearly certain that I can’t describe it in a short story, but I’ll do my best.

I went to Addis Ababa to meet with other young leaders from all over Western Europe to discuss where we are going as a ministry. We are painfully aware that our ministry needs to change and adapt if we are going to see God’s kingdom advance in Europe. One of the big changes that we discussed was the need to see a shift toward taking a more holistic approach in our ministry. We need to be living out equally the Great Commandment and the Great Commission. We discussed God’s heart to redeem the world to himself, and His desire to transform us into His agents of restoration.

On the surface, it sounds obvious or even trite, but if we take this call seriously, the implications of this shift are really enormous. It changes how I do evangelism and discipleship. It changes everything.

This is Samuel. He’s 13 years old. His parents are dead and he lives with his grandparents in a slum near the University of Addis Ababa, across from the Campus Crusade for Christ discipleship training center. Two months ago his section of the slum was burned down in a fire probably set by government agents to make space for a new university building. Now he lives among some 50 families in one of two makeshift tents set up on the site of the fire.

Ever since Campus Crusade opened the center, there was a lot of persecution from the people living in the surrounding slum. (Most Ethiopians come from the highly traditional, or nominal, Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Persecution is very common against protestants.) The youth would throw rocks at people as they were coming and going to the center, and parents were very skeptical of the protestants making sure their children kept a safe distance.

This hard situation was a perfect opportunity for us to live out the changes that we had been discussing as a group. These people are in serious need, and we wanted to love them as ourselves and meet some of their physical needs. There was also the broken relationship between protestants and the community which was preventing them from hearing the good news of Jesus Christ in a clear way. As agents of restoration we wanted to restore that relationship and build credibility for Campus Crusade among the community. To that end we raised money in Europe to give to this community in two ways. First we provided for the education of 110 children from the neighborhood (including Samuel) for 4 years. Second, we did re-construction work on many of the “homes” in the slum that were in desperate need of repairs.

Needless to say, the relationship between Campus Crusade and the community was radically changed over those few days. As children swarmed around us and took us to meet their families the question on everyone's lips in broken English was - Why did you come here? Why are you doing this? What an opportunity to share the Gospel!

So what is this Great River that is sweeping me away? Maybe it’s God’s heart for the nations, His desire to redeem and restore broken people. His call to us to join Him and become His agents of restoration in a fallen and hurting world. His Spirit being poured out through us flooding through the streets of places like Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Rome, Italy; Indianapolis, Indiana; wherever we are and gathering together to advance His kingdom around the world. I haven't really figured it out yet, but I can’t stop praising the Lord that I get to be a part of this, and thanking Him for all of you who make it possible for me to ride in this Great River!

Launching Gospel Communities and Missional Teams

Ok - I'm going to temporatily break from my looking backward theme to write about some things that I have been thinking about more recently. Included in our missional stepping stones are Gospel communities and Missional Teams. One of the many things that I have been pondering while I've been home in Indiana is "what is the difference between a Gospel Community and a missional team?".

{If you read the entries about our new direction or our structure, you may have already seen the words "missional teams" or "Gospel communities", and you might be thinking "what is he talking about?", or "why these new terms? Wouldn't it be easier to just say outreach groups and bible studies?" Well, I think that there are some key differences between our traditional ministry approaches, and how we are approaching it now. These two concepts (Missional teams and Gospel Communities) have been foundational for us as we have begun to reshape our ministry in this last year. I hope that this post will give better definition to these groups.}

I can't remember who I was talking with about this recently, probably my good friend Rex, but the key difference between the two that stuck out to me was the element of intentionality. As I have been pondering it more, here are some of my thoughts:

We as missional teams, want to see Gospel communities emerge naturally where we are intentionally living out and speaking a credible witness of the life transforming power of the Gospel to a pre-existing relationship network. These new Gospel communities can and should be a place where informal interaction begins to happen over Gospel content, life-change stories, the Scriptures, who Jesus really is, and how His reality impacts our life. Not much planning, or organizing is needed once the seeds have been planted. We go (missional) and model this interaction (incarnational) in a group. If the seed takes root, then it begins to bear fruit and reproduce. To use a different analogy, in a Gospel community the Gospel spreads like a virus infecting a network of people.

Once a virus is released into a susceptible population, the virus itself does all the work of spreading, taking advantage of the interconnectedness of the group. When someone catches a cold they (hopefully) don't go around trying to infect others. However, the cold spreads on it's own, and pretty soon anyone inside an infected network is feeling it's effects. In the same way when the Gospel message enters into a group and "infects" a few members of that group, little intentionality is needed before the network is exposed to the epidemic. So launching a Gospel community is all about releasing the true Gospel into a people network through an intentional and credible witness, and letting it spread naturally. We know that a Gospel community has been launched when we see signs of fruit popping up where we on the missional team have not sown seed.

We have definitely seen this happen in Rome with friends of friends approaching us and saying something along the lines of "are you the ones that talk about Jesus. My friends have been telling me about this and I want to talk to you about it. They say that it has really changed their life."

I think that this helps define what a Gospel community is, an outbreak of the Gospel message.

As encouraging as this is, a Gospel community is not all that we are hoping to see. Far from it. In order to see a true outbreak of the kingdom where lives are transformed and the world is changed, we must see these new Gospel communities embrace discipleship, embrace the implications of the Gospel, and begin to follow Jesus with their whole lives. Yes individually, but equally importantly as a group. We must see new missional teams launched.

I was re-reading a couple of chapters in Alan Hirsch's book "The Forgotten Ways". One quote from the introduction to section 2 gave me some insight into the depth of intentionality that is really required of a missional team.

"So a working definition of missional church is a community of God's people that defines itself, and organizes its life around, its real purpose of being an agent of God's mission to the world... The mission of God flows directly through every believer and every community of faith that adheres to Jesus." {emphasis mine}

When a group begins to intentionally engage another group as agents of restoration, it is making the transition. However, I think that Hirsh rightly sets the bar quite a bit higher. For a gospel community to really become a missional team, Jesus needs to become the center. The group must take on a Christ-like call to God's mission of redemption and restoration that re-defines their identity and re-directs their life.

I believe that we have seen tons of growth in knowing how to launch Gospel communities, but how we will see Gospel communities transition to being missional teams? We certainly have a lot to learn in this area, but I believe that the power of the Gospel can and will transform any true Gospel community, bringing the inevitable result of life transformation, movement launching, and world change.

Our Structure - Bows and Arrows

After that long post about our direction, I would like to do a shorter post. However, the next piece of the puzzle to put in place is fairly complex. We'll see how it goes.

One thing that I have been learning over the past year is how critical it is for your organizational structure to match up with and support your direction. If you say that you want to be missional or organic, or that you want to learn and try new strategies, but organizationally all of your decisions are made from a centralized leadership... good luck, it's never going to happen. It's like trying to boat across a mountain pass. You've chosen the wrong means of transport. It might work in some situations, but it will only burden you in a lot of others. Now that's not to say a boat is useless, just that it's a poor choice for crossing mountains.

For our "year zero" launch, our national team developed and implemented a new structure to help us really be able to travel in the direction we wanted to go in Rome. This new structure allowed us to more faithfully live out our guiding principles and be more effective in seeing progress on our missional stepping stones. The analogy that we used to picture our new structure was a bow and arrow.

Arrows

The arrows represent missional teams, small autonomous teams with a specific ministry target. These missional teams are designed to be small and fast moving, to be released to go and penetrate their target, like an arrow.

The Bow or Arco (in Italian)

The arco represents a periodic gathering of the missional teams where we interact over our common values (The Scriptures, worship, fellowship, vision, etc.). The intent behind the arco is to be the source of strength and direction giving the Arrows the power and direction they need to penetrate their targets.

To start the year we had 2 arcos and 6 arrows. The beauty of this new structure was that we were really able to push the leadership out to the boundaries of the organization freeing up missional teams to make decisions and try new approaches, and allowing us to really learn and change.

Now it wasn't all good or easy. In some ways we weren't ready to fully make that change, and we didn't really implement the concept that faithfully. There were also a lot of issues that needed to be addressed, and it was difficult to know how to address them. However, it was a huge step in the right direction. For next year we will be more or less keeping the same structure in place just tweaking it to make it more faithful to the original concept.

Having written so much about vision and structure, I want to clarify that I do NOT believe that these things are what will give us success in our ministry. We will only see our vision accomplished as we seek the Lord and step out in faith to follow Him into His mission to redeem the world to Himself. What we have done in setting direction and organizing ourselves is just a small yet important part of being a good steward in that whole process.

Lost Time and Our New Direction

As I'm beginning to think about keeping up this blog, I'm realizing that I've already lost a LOT of time since I started. In September of 2008 we launched year "zero" of the Rome City Focus. Since then, my thoughts about ministry in Rome have really taken a new direction. In order to make sure that anyone reading this is on the same page, I think that it would be good to rewind and walk through some of the major changes, events, and lessons learned from year zero. This could take me a while, but I would love to do it.

As a disclaimer, I will be explaining things from my point of view, so I'll include only what I see as the most critical elements and my thoughts on things may be a little different than someone else's. I will also take a little bit of liberty where needed to simplify the process or explain things in the way that I see them.

So much has happened since last year that it's hard for me to know where to begin. So come with me as I rewind to a sunny September day in downtown Rome. I had recently returned from Ethiopia (I'll write about this in a future blog entry) was enjoying a gelato as I walked by the Spanish steps to our first meeting as a team in year zero. With 15 long-term staff in place and 9 short term (stinters) just arriving from the United States, the National Leadership team came down to Rome from Florence to present the newly minted "direction package" which would guide our ministry. This direction package was a real blessing for us, giving us a bearing to set out on our journey...

The Direction Package - The Antioch Job

the following is just an overview - if you read anything and want clarification, just let me know. I would love to explain it in more depth. Really I would - I love this stuff!

Our worldwide vision as an organization is to see:

• Movements everywhere so that everyone knows someone who truly follows Jesus.

Our mission as Agape Italia is to:

• Transform Lives - Jesus transforms lives and the Gospel sets people free to live out God's purpose in their lives.
• Ignite Movements - Transformed lives ignite movements. Passionate people, living with purpose, infecting everyone around them with the joy of Jesus.
• Change the World - God calls us to be his agents of restoration advancing His kingdom around the world, and participating in His mission to redeem the whole world to himself.

Guiding Principles - These are our guide posts that keep us on course moving toward our mission.

• Starts with me - The Gospel is for me. First and foremost, I need to be living a transformed life. I need to be a catalyst launching movements. I need to be engaging in God's mission to change the world.
• Embody the mission - Use a missional and incarnational style of ministry.
• Multiply yourself - Discipleship is critical.
• Be lean and mean - Focus on what matters and be a good steward of what you have.
• Be a learner - Innovate, create, adapt, and take faith risks. Be a student of 21st century missions in Europe. We don't know the solutions yet.
• Pass the Baton -Mobilize Italians and give away ownership of the ministry.

Missional Stepping Stones - These are the things that we track to see how we are progressing toward our mission.

• New relationships initiated
• On-going relationships
• Gospel heard
• Decisions of faith
• Gospel communities
• Multiplying Disciples
• Missional Team Leaders
• Lifetime Laborers
• Full time Agape Staff

Our Faith Goal is to ignite 100 movements by 2012!

Well those are the most critical and or unique elements of the direction that the National team set out for us. The majority of what we have done since then is mostly building off of this. I think that it is a good place to start in processing my thoughts on Rome.

Long time no post

I guess it's about time to update the blog. I really would like to do this more, I just have yet to find a way that really works for me. Unfortunately, I am somewhat of a closet perfectionist. One place where this shows up is in writing. I don't really like journaling that much because I'm rarely satisfied with how things come out on paper. My thoughts always sounds so much more profound in my head =).

OK well I'm going to give this blog another go... I do think that it is worthwhile, and I think that it could be useful for me to process some of my thoughts. I've had so many ideas running through my head this summer as I've been preparing to head back to Rome and take on my new leadership position in the city. It's hard to sort them out. If anybody is out there reading this - let me know what you think. I'd love to get your feedback on my ramblings...

We've got a long way to go, but God is doing the hard work of His kingdom as we faithfully sow the seed. Bring on the harvest.

La Bella Vita

“Yes, I think you are right… we cannot love perfectly until we experience the perfect love of God.”

We met Rino several months ago at "La Sapienza", the largest university in Europe, during our English conversation time. He also came to our Thanksgiving dinner, but since then we haven't really seen much of him. So it was quite a nice surprise to see Rino show up at our weekly meeting. It was his first time there, but he was really diving in.

The topic of the evening was - love. We started off looking at a rather bizarre paining by Mauricio Bouzas Gasque called Love Song. We then went around the room discussing what this painting communicated about love.

We followed up the discussion by watching a clip from the movie “Les Misérables”. It was the scene at the beginning of the movie when Jean Valjean, fresh from prison, is generously welcomed into the home of a trusting, loving priest. In the middle of the night the priest awakes to find Valjean stealing his silverware. Emerging from the shadows, Valjean strikes the old man and flees. The next morning, Valjean is captured and brought to the priest’s home by the police. However, instead of giving him what he deserves, the priest rescues him by claiming that the silverware was a gift, then going even farther to give him two silver candlesticks as well. This redemptive act of unconditional love is a mirror of God’s love to us in Christ, and it forever changes the course of Valjean’s life.



We closed off the meeting by discussing in small groups the meaning of 1 John 4:18-19.

"There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. We love because he first loved us."

Overall it was a very fun evening and a great conversation. Rino grasped, maybe for the first time, that God’s unconditional love is something that we can’t get, give, or experience on our own. Please pray that he would truly experience and be transformed by the unconditional love of Christ.

The Call of Discipleship

With a heavy heart, I was wandering through the old city center in Rome looking for a quiet place to pray and read my Bible. I stepped into a church halfway between the Pantheon and Piazza Navona and sitting down in an empty pew, it took me about 15 seconds to realize that I had not chosen wisely. The church (museum) was buzzing with activity and was anything but quiet. Most of the people were gathered around the chapel at the left front of the cathedral. So as I got up to leave, I decided to see what the fuss was about.

As I walked up to the chapel on the side of the church, someone inserted a coin into a box on the wall which illuminated the chapel, revealing three magnificent, nearly life sized, paintings including the one shown above: “The Calling of Saint Matthew.” All of the paintings are by Michelangelo Merisi commonly known as Caravaggio.

In the painting, we see Christ on the far right reaching out to Matthew (also called Levi) and challenging him to “Follow me.” (See Matthew 9:9-12.) Caravaggio captures Matthew at his moment of decision, with one hand pointing to himself, and one hand still grasping the coins on the table. But not only Matthew is shown here. The different reactions of the figures around the table reflect our common responses to God’s calling in our lives: surprise, indifference, astonishment, resentment, excitement, fear, etc.

As I looked at this painting and read a bit about it, the Lord really spoke to me, reminding me of my call to follow Christ. To be completely honest, I had been in a real slump facing financial difficulties, and having trouble trusting God to provide for the calling that I know He has given me. It was as if Christ was illuminating this dark place in my heart and asking, “Brian, will you follow me, or will you be consumed worrying about money?” Coming home to raise support has been a really challenging time of trusting God and relying on his grace to lead me through a crisis of discipleship, but I am truly excited to see the growth that He brings about in my life through this time as I choose to follow Him.

There is a lot more that could be said about this incredible painting, click here to watch a little video that talks a bit more about some of the symbolism in the painting.