Everything about Princeton Alliance Church at the Crossroads says, "Urban professionals are welcome here." The church campus in New Jersey's research corridor was intentionally constructed to look like the executive office parks nearby. Each church ministry models a quality standard consistent with the surrounding business community. Not surprisingly, the church has made great inroads for Christ with executives and managers at nearby Merrill Lynch, Bloomberg, and Bristol-Myers Squibb. "Our calling is to reach everyone we can," says pastor Bob Cushman, "but we know we're best at connecting with urban professionals, so that's why we build a corporate feel into all we do."
9 Six hundred miles to the southwest, Quest Community Church in Lexington, Kentucky, has a similar passion for outreach but does best at impacting a different community. Pastor Pete Hise is proud of the fact that 25 percent of the people who attend Sunday mornings are either atheists or agnostics. He's particularly glad that young people with body piercings find lots of others at the church who look like them. "Which church in Lexington will reach that kind of person for Jesus?" he asks. "The one gaping hole in most churches' ministry is in reaching the Generation X crowd. That's what we do best." He estimates that as many as three hundred thousand people in greater Lexington need to hear about Jesus in a way they have not yet heard.
These two churches share the same overall mission of turning irreligious people into committed followers of Christ, but the local expressions are completely different. Each is appropriate for some segment of its community. Each of these churches has found its own flavor.
It's time to go beyond knowing and believing God's truth to experiencing and demonstrating God's presence. God wants you to be authentic, the real deal, becoming a change agent for the entire world.
Start by UnLearning
To become an indigenous, relevant community, you will un-Learn lots of things you thought were right.
UnLearning is about going a different direction. UnLearning means repentance. It requires us to identify ways we were wrong and to rebuild in a new direction. UnLearning is about breaking away from the pack, because a crowd will always be slower to respond to the radical voice of Jesus Christ. UnLearning is about ways the Holy Spirit can adjust your leadership skills and attitudes. Then you, in turn, can lead the way for a similar transformation in others. Most important, unLearning is about experience.
Leaders who unLearn are a different breed from what you may be used to. They are willing to fail. They break their own rules— at least the rules that prohibit people from becoming passionate followers of Jesus. UnLearning churches demonstrate an uncompromising approach to church mission and ministry. The methods may seem new, but the approach follows an ancient call.
Why a book about unLearning? Any navigator who travels fluid waters knows the need to change the angle of a boat's sails as soon as the wind blows from a new direction. Today's ocean of constantly changing pop-culture breezes may make you uncomfortable. That's a good thing. Discomfort precedes change. Tension spurs learning and growth. It's important for you to ask questions that other leaders may not be asking. Now is the time to seriously evaluate what you're doing in light of the fresh wind of God's Spirit blowing through a post-Christian world.
UnLearning Church will inspire you to create a safe space, an environment in which people are free to become radical followers of Jesus Christ. This book will challenge how you see and do church. It will speak to both head and heart, and chances are you'll find yourself on an unexpected spiritual journey.
Are you ready to take yourself and your church on that kind of journey? Ready to unLearn anything in your church, leadership, or lifestyle that stands in the way? God is calling people to develop faith communities that effectively reach unchurched populations for Jesus Christ in a postmodern, post-Christian world—radical disciples abandoned to the purpose of evangelism through relevant service.
Want to be there? Then let's begin unLearning.
UnLearning churches defy old identities.
They don't fit into the usual categories.
They're tough to label, difficult to classify,
and downright unpredictable. UnLearning
churches are based on shared life in
Jesus—not issue-centered ideology. The
people at the helm are fully dependent on
the leading of the unseen Spirit of God.
"Church growth" was the mantra of the 1980s and 1990s. I attended my first "Breaking the Two Hundred Barrier" conference shortly after becoming Ginghamsburg's pastor in 1979. Then I enrolled in "Breaking Four Hundred" and "Breaking Eight Hundred."
We became experts at methodologies that involved small group and Sunday school ministries. When it was trendy to do so, we shifted from a programmatic approach to a cell-driven approach.
We began to develop associations around the successful megachurches of that day. We learned about the pastor as CEO, and I adopted that model. In the late 1990s, I really thought the contemporary megachurch would be the church of the future. It was the kind of church almost everyone seemed to aspire to become. Our culture preferred Wal-Mart superstores to the corner drugstore and giant Home Depots to local hardware stores. It made sense for churches to follow that same pattern.
To move forward, I have had to unLearn the megachurch and CEO models. If we continue to copy the models of the 1980s and 1990s, we're going to miss the next generation. I'm now learning to take my cues from the age-group that's under thirty-five. A one-size-fits-all approach toward growth will definitely not be the most effective model of the twenty-first century.
Change is so constant today that no one can predict the effective church of the future, yet I don't believe it will be the shopping-mall-size megachurch. As many growing churches have demonstrated, once you exceed an attendance of four hundred, a majority of growth can be transfer growth from already-churched populations. Some megachurches have seen success in reaching unchurched populations, but too often church growth in the United States and Canada does not represent net gains for the kingdom of God.
A seismic shift is occurring in the practice of church. Emerging churches are defying many of the formulas of the late-twentiethcentury church-growth movement. The newest islands of health and hope are not the "Fortune 500 churches"—the established models of the 1980s and 1990s that everyone was trying to clone. A new breed of churches is emerging, led by a new generation of young innovators who noticeably resist trying to duplicate the successful church-growth models of the last century.
What's Your "One Thing"?
Like those two churches I described above, unLearning churches are finding their special niche where they can connect with certain people better than any other church can. I recently visited five growing churches in Oklahoma City, each with one thousand or more in attendance, but they're all distinct in the ways they are appealing to and serving that city. They are not all trying to look like the same megachurch model. One church emphasizes the Creation. Its campus is full of waterfalls and living plants, and it sponsors a wide diversity of life-generating ministries in the community, from an eye clinic in the inner city to programs for ex-offenders. Another communicates the atmosphere of a high-class hotel, featuring a more classical appearance and reaching the upper-middle class with strong ministries to singles and blended families.
These churches may all share the same geographic area, but they are reaching distinctly different people groups. The distinctiveness of churches like these goes far beyond