This is a session from Jim Leffel, teacher at Xenos Christian Fellowship on spiritual growth.
There is a wide range of considerations when thinking about spiritual growth through Christian community.
* Theological Convictions - What does spiritual growth look like? What is the relationship between growing spiritually and the church?
* Barriers to Biblical ideals - Are Christians shaped by culture? Are Christians blind to cultural influences?
* The Great Commission - What is the difference between winning converts and making disciples? What is the connection between spiritual growth and winning disciples?
* Practical - How to foster dynamic Christian community?
What does growth look like?
Christianity is not merely credal. It is not a list of things we say we believe and then we move on. The biblical metephors for growth are botany and physical biology (alive, growing, bearing fruit). The vitality of growth is measured relationally, and not by how far we retreat from the world. The greatest commandment is to love God and neighbor.
The fruit of the Spirit demonstrates character change (Gal.5:22-23). All of the fruit are relational. You need to be in relationship with people in order to demonstrate them.
We need to watch for the doors God opens and be prepared for those moments (1Peter 3:15). There is a paradox of discipleship that the more we give up, the more we gain (10:39; 16:25).
Spiritual growth is a fundamental life transformation manifesting the love of Christ. The context for life transformation is the Church.
Individual and Corporate Life
* There is both "me" and "we" in salvation. See the book Community of the King by Howard Snyder and The New Chosen People: A Corporate View of Election by William Klein.
* Individuals matter to God (called, elect, chosen...). These occur in a corporate setting - the Greek word "ekklesia" meaning "called out ones" (Ephesians 1:22, 23). God's work in the world is carried out through the Church.
* We gain a new community (1 Peter 2:9) having radical inclusion: there is a place for everyone in the Kingdom.
* We have an "oikos" meaning household, family. Salvation comes through adoption into the family of God. We have brothers and sisters and we need to be responsible for them (1Peter 4:10).
* We are part of Chirst's body (1Corinthians 12:13).
There are some implications to this:
1) Radical individualism. Isolation is not possible for growing Christians. The cost of individualism is that 25% of people have no one to discuss life with, and of the 75% who do, 80% have only a family member. Only 15% have close friends outside the family. This causes heavy alienation and lonliness. We are less sensitive to the needs of others and can go from apathetic to antisocial. There is increased physical and emotional ill health.
Only 15% of evangelicals have been spiritually mentored. Only 46% feel strongly the responsibility to share Christ. 53% say that their main purpose in life is enjoyment and personal fulfillment (from Barna's book Growing True Disciples).
2) Family life strains. Cultural values and trends are largely reflected in the Church. This leads to too much pressure on marriages, too little support or input, and no models for parenting. The cell provides a biblical context for family. The "household ordinances" are carried out in the context of Christian community. This happens because there is a broad relational base and tangible personal service. This is how we will resolve the tide of selfishness.
Is God calling us to a sense of urgency about spiritual growth?
Monday 23 July 2007
Becoming a Spiritual Community - Part 2
Here's Part 2 of Larry Crabb's session:
When reading the Bible, we must not come to the text with our questions but listening to the questions God wants to answer. Questions like....
1. Who is God? God is a community.
2. What’s he up to? Teaching us to move with Him. We are often too afraid of intimacy with the Holy Spirit to let him teach us how to dance.
3. Who are we? Gendered image bearers, bearing the image of God.
4. What’s gone wrong? Sin.
5. What has God done? Providing change coming from looking bad in the presence of love. Providing forgiveness.
6. What is the Spirit doing today? Lifting our denial of desire. Showing us we were built for another world. Until we are empty, thirsty, desiring to see Him. Lifting denial of guilt. So that we value Jesus more than anything else.
7. How do we tag along with the Spirit? Through spiritual community.
The Practice of Spiritual Community
What does it look like to participate in the inner life of the Trinity and to carry that life into our relationships?
It looks like reaching with supernatural power into the depths of another person’s heart so that the evil in our hearts that rules so often unrecognized in how we relate is clearly identified and exposed as hateful. The Holy Spirit is given full permission to release our appetite for the Father. Our reality is not God's reality. God wants to show us our reality until we are helpless before him.
God’s Reality: The Trinity - The Church - Our Reality: Seen and Unseen
How does God’s reality become my reality? - Through the Church. He forms us by how we relate to each other.
How to relate to each other:
We must enter the battle raging beneath the surface. We need to look deeper at the battle between the flesh and Spirit as we relate to each other. Rom 8:7
We must see the vision in the mind of God for the person we are relating to.
We must touch the soul with the Spirit’s power that works in us.
When reading the Bible, we must not come to the text with our questions but listening to the questions God wants to answer. Questions like....
1. Who is God? God is a community.
2. What’s he up to? Teaching us to move with Him. We are often too afraid of intimacy with the Holy Spirit to let him teach us how to dance.
3. Who are we? Gendered image bearers, bearing the image of God.
4. What’s gone wrong? Sin.
5. What has God done? Providing change coming from looking bad in the presence of love. Providing forgiveness.
6. What is the Spirit doing today? Lifting our denial of desire. Showing us we were built for another world. Until we are empty, thirsty, desiring to see Him. Lifting denial of guilt. So that we value Jesus more than anything else.
7. How do we tag along with the Spirit? Through spiritual community.
The Practice of Spiritual Community
What does it look like to participate in the inner life of the Trinity and to carry that life into our relationships?
It looks like reaching with supernatural power into the depths of another person’s heart so that the evil in our hearts that rules so often unrecognized in how we relate is clearly identified and exposed as hateful. The Holy Spirit is given full permission to release our appetite for the Father. Our reality is not God's reality. God wants to show us our reality until we are helpless before him.
God’s Reality: The Trinity - The Church - Our Reality: Seen and Unseen
How does God’s reality become my reality? - Through the Church. He forms us by how we relate to each other.
How to relate to each other:
We must enter the battle raging beneath the surface. We need to look deeper at the battle between the flesh and Spirit as we relate to each other. Rom 8:7
We must see the vision in the mind of God for the person we are relating to.
We must touch the soul with the Spirit’s power that works in us.
Becoming a Spiritual Community - Part 1
Here's the notes from a session with Larry Crabb (psychologist and author of The Safest Place On Earth and a bunch more books).
The premis is that what we need is not professional help but spiritual community as the Trinity models it. We may fall short at this type of Christian community but we can work toward it.
“We who offer spiritual leadership often find ourselves not living what we are preaching and teaching. It is not easy to avoid hypocrisy completely because we find ourselves saying things larger than ourselves. I often call people to a life I am not fully able to live.
I am learning that the best cure for hypocrisy is community. Hypocrisy is not so much the result of not living what I preach but much more of not confessing my inability to fully live up to my own words.” – Henri Nouwen
The Trinity exemplifies perfect communion - perfect relationship. There are no relationships in hell. Sometimes the church becomes a picture of hell rather than a picture of Trinitarian community. Isolation and our own needs are what the Bible considers death. In our age, the therapeutic community allows us to sit in our individual emotional needs and not in relationship. It is important that we live in communion with each other.
The GOAL of SPIRITUAL COMMUNITY:
1) Ask - What we need to know about ourselves and God to aim toward it?
Here's a question: When a first time visitor comes to your church, how would they answer “What’s this church all about?”
In the book Jim & Casper Go To Church, Jim took his friend Casper, an atheist, to a variety of well known churches in the US. Casper's response after visiting all of the churches was, “If people who had never heard of Jesus visited these churches, they’d have to conclude that Jesus’ number one priority was that Christians invest the very best of their energy and their money into putting on a church event. Is this what Jesus told you guys to do?” – Matt Casper
The goal of the church is to change us. To make us Christ-like for the Father’s pleasure and for the mission in the world, not for producing a church event.
“I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you.” – Galatians 4:19
“We proclaim Christ...so that we may present everyone perfect (mature). To this end I labor, struggling with all His energy which so powerfully works in me.” – Colossians 1:28, 29
We need to make disciples through conversations that matter. We are called to relate in such a way that gifting and talent does not make possible; that is natural. Loving like the Trinity is supernatural. This is why a PhD in Psychology can leave you still not reaching people. This is often uncomfortable for us because we love our own pleasure and our own comforts. We must love Jesus more than our pleasure.
See the book by John Owen – Communion with God.
2) Ask - What is spiritual community?
In the therapeutic community, people focus on individualism. This defines the health of the individual over the spiritual community.
But in John 17:21, Jesus prays that we would be in communion with the Trinity.
Often the Trinity is more like a problem to solve than a reality to enter. We spend forever studying and learning about the Trinity but do not realize the full application of what all of this means.
Perichoresis – Moving together in perfect harmony with love, with the ruling desire to give another what is alive in ones self for the sake of the other’s well-being.
In spiritual community, we attend to what is most uniquely alive in us that comes from the Spirit and we freely give it to others with their well-being in view. This is difficult because we are naturally self-obsessed. From conception the energy ruling from our center is individualistic.
We live to protect whatever we value in ourselves rather than living to give what might prove valuable to another.
The NEW COVENANT, an arrangement conceived by the Trinity that makes spiritual community possible:
A new purity: absolute forgiveness
A new identity: defined by relationship
A new appetite: outside law becomes inside desire
A new power: the energy to love.
The premis is that what we need is not professional help but spiritual community as the Trinity models it. We may fall short at this type of Christian community but we can work toward it.
“We who offer spiritual leadership often find ourselves not living what we are preaching and teaching. It is not easy to avoid hypocrisy completely because we find ourselves saying things larger than ourselves. I often call people to a life I am not fully able to live.
I am learning that the best cure for hypocrisy is community. Hypocrisy is not so much the result of not living what I preach but much more of not confessing my inability to fully live up to my own words.” – Henri Nouwen
The Trinity exemplifies perfect communion - perfect relationship. There are no relationships in hell. Sometimes the church becomes a picture of hell rather than a picture of Trinitarian community. Isolation and our own needs are what the Bible considers death. In our age, the therapeutic community allows us to sit in our individual emotional needs and not in relationship. It is important that we live in communion with each other.
The GOAL of SPIRITUAL COMMUNITY:
1) Ask - What we need to know about ourselves and God to aim toward it?
Here's a question: When a first time visitor comes to your church, how would they answer “What’s this church all about?”
In the book Jim & Casper Go To Church, Jim took his friend Casper, an atheist, to a variety of well known churches in the US. Casper's response after visiting all of the churches was, “If people who had never heard of Jesus visited these churches, they’d have to conclude that Jesus’ number one priority was that Christians invest the very best of their energy and their money into putting on a church event. Is this what Jesus told you guys to do?” – Matt Casper
The goal of the church is to change us. To make us Christ-like for the Father’s pleasure and for the mission in the world, not for producing a church event.
“I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you.” – Galatians 4:19
“We proclaim Christ...so that we may present everyone perfect (mature). To this end I labor, struggling with all His energy which so powerfully works in me.” – Colossians 1:28, 29
We need to make disciples through conversations that matter. We are called to relate in such a way that gifting and talent does not make possible; that is natural. Loving like the Trinity is supernatural. This is why a PhD in Psychology can leave you still not reaching people. This is often uncomfortable for us because we love our own pleasure and our own comforts. We must love Jesus more than our pleasure.
See the book by John Owen – Communion with God.
2) Ask - What is spiritual community?
In the therapeutic community, people focus on individualism. This defines the health of the individual over the spiritual community.
But in John 17:21, Jesus prays that we would be in communion with the Trinity.
Often the Trinity is more like a problem to solve than a reality to enter. We spend forever studying and learning about the Trinity but do not realize the full application of what all of this means.
Perichoresis – Moving together in perfect harmony with love, with the ruling desire to give another what is alive in ones self for the sake of the other’s well-being.
In spiritual community, we attend to what is most uniquely alive in us that comes from the Spirit and we freely give it to others with their well-being in view. This is difficult because we are naturally self-obsessed. From conception the energy ruling from our center is individualistic.
We live to protect whatever we value in ourselves rather than living to give what might prove valuable to another.
The NEW COVENANT, an arrangement conceived by the Trinity that makes spiritual community possible:
A new purity: absolute forgiveness
A new identity: defined by relationship
A new appetite: outside law becomes inside desire
A new power: the energy to love.
Home Group Conference Notes
A group of us just returned from a conference on Home Groups at Xenos Christian Fellowship in Columbus Ohio. It was the most useful conference I have ever attended. Most of the conferences I have been to in the past were put on by megachurches. A lot of times the sessions at these conferences are about new ideas that will bring a crowd to the church building. The Xenos conference was refreshing because it was more value based than technique based. Did I agree with everything they had to say? Not always, but they challenged us with a Scripture based value system and exposed us to things that broadened our way of thinking.
I am going to blog my notes on these sessions, but before I do, I should give some background to the Xenos model. This way there will be a context for the session notes.
Xenos was started in the 70's by a couple of hippies. It is amazing to see how this has developed into 5000 people. They are a House Church based fellowship. Each House Cchurch runs somewhere between 20-50 people (in Columbus, homes appear to be able to sustain those numbers). These House Churches - also called Home Groups - are their core structure.
They have also have a Central Teaching time on Sunday mornings. Groups of House Churches meet at different times on Sunday for their Central Teaching time.
Also within the House Churches are Cell Groups. The Central Teaching and Home Groups are open to anyone. The Cell Groups are men and women (divided by gender) who would like to move forward in discipleship. (So if you are from RVWC - the terms Home Groups and Cell Groups are used interchangeably by us, but not by Xenos - this caused some confusion when we were in the sessions and didn't know this).
So the basic flow is this:
Central Teaching - Home Groups- Cell Groups
The core value of Xenos is relational community. Everything is based on this value. Home Groups grow and multiply - thus the 5000 people attending.
Just one of my observations - I saw Dennis McCallum (the lead teacher of Xenos) walking around on many occasions. When he walked into a room it didn't seem like people really noticed - unlike in many of our fellowships where people flock to the pastor to make appointments etc. At Xenos, the people do the ministry. The leadership team equips them for this work - this includes marrying, burying, counseling, etc.
There are many more observations that I will mention as I blog these notes. I believe it is productive to be challenged and even rubbed the wrong way. When we become set in our ways and think that there is a set formula for advancing the Kingdom, we lose sight of the greater Christian community and the variety found within it. I hope you will be challenged to examine what the Scripture says, like I was, as you read the session notes.
I am going to blog my notes on these sessions, but before I do, I should give some background to the Xenos model. This way there will be a context for the session notes.
Xenos was started in the 70's by a couple of hippies. It is amazing to see how this has developed into 5000 people. They are a House Church based fellowship. Each House Cchurch runs somewhere between 20-50 people (in Columbus, homes appear to be able to sustain those numbers). These House Churches - also called Home Groups - are their core structure.
They have also have a Central Teaching time on Sunday mornings. Groups of House Churches meet at different times on Sunday for their Central Teaching time.
Also within the House Churches are Cell Groups. The Central Teaching and Home Groups are open to anyone. The Cell Groups are men and women (divided by gender) who would like to move forward in discipleship. (So if you are from RVWC - the terms Home Groups and Cell Groups are used interchangeably by us, but not by Xenos - this caused some confusion when we were in the sessions and didn't know this).
So the basic flow is this:
Central Teaching - Home Groups- Cell Groups
The core value of Xenos is relational community. Everything is based on this value. Home Groups grow and multiply - thus the 5000 people attending.
Just one of my observations - I saw Dennis McCallum (the lead teacher of Xenos) walking around on many occasions. When he walked into a room it didn't seem like people really noticed - unlike in many of our fellowships where people flock to the pastor to make appointments etc. At Xenos, the people do the ministry. The leadership team equips them for this work - this includes marrying, burying, counseling, etc.
There are many more observations that I will mention as I blog these notes. I believe it is productive to be challenged and even rubbed the wrong way. When we become set in our ways and think that there is a set formula for advancing the Kingdom, we lose sight of the greater Christian community and the variety found within it. I hope you will be challenged to examine what the Scripture says, like I was, as you read the session notes.
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