the    sides

This is part 4 of my notes from the Beautiful Day Conference.

Dan Kimball is the founding pastor of Graceland that morphed/transitioned into Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, California. He’s probably best known as an “emergent author”, his latest book being They Like Jesus But Not The Church.

Where do you spend most of your time as a leader? In the church doing church business or in the community? Your calender shows your focus and what’s important.

Compassion must be a natural part of the life of a church, not a program or ministry. A complete follower of Jesus acts like his teacher. Jesus lived out compassion all the time. If you don’t make it just as important as worship, prayer, giving, etc… then it becomes another program in the church. That’s scary and what I’m seeing happen now.

Church is NOT a building - it’s people. Yet by our calendar and our money we support the very view that they should “come to church” every week. We support the unhealthy view that the building and the Sunday morning service is the most important part of being a Christian. We ought to be saying and doing this - “We don’t go to church, the church comes to a building each week”.

You have to define yourself or someone else will - words matter.

Good shepherds meet needs and have good theology. Gospel is good theology AND good practice.

GE’s Takes:
First, Dan Kimball is one of the most unlikely ‘leaders’ in the world. He is an introverts introvert. When he talks - he’s not going to wow you with his performance or catchy phrases. Which…is a good thing. It’s his words and insight that matter.

As Dan was talking, I was struck by two things. First, he’s been unfairly and ruthlessly abused by the “evangelical” side of the fence. I lost count how many times Dan referred to Jesus and His story and Him being the Christ-Man, the God-man. In short, his speech was undeniably Jesus-centric. There was no mention of the post-modern culture or emergent church or anything of that nature. He seemed to be consumed by and for Jesus. A marked difference than those that critique him that seem to only quote culture and politics and not a lot about Jesus.

Second, he’s really wrestled with the theology of ‘church.’ He asked hard questions of us - is the building and what we do on Sunday morning the focal point of our ministry? If it is - why? What informs that decision? Good questions.

There was a guy in the Q & A afterwards that really pushed for no buildings, meet in homes, no paid staff approach to church because that was how it was and how it should be.

Therein lies the problem - no, it wasn’t always like that. The fact is the “church” has always had both - the home/cell/small aspect as well as the corporate, community aspect. A whole tribe in the formation of Israel couldn’t own land but rather had to trust the rest of the nation to support them as they worked for God in the Temple - Levi. So, it’s not that clear-cut.

The amount of extravagance that was poured into the Temple - by God’s command - would embarrass most of us now if we tried to build something like that. Yet - there it is - God did ordain and call for the building of it, if we are going to take all of the Scripture seriously. Even Paul has hints that there were some who were to be paid and supported by the local church.

The bottom line - it’s not clear exactly how we are supposed to balance the financial/building side of the equation with the missional side of it. All of us end up leaning one way or the other, some ping the extremes of each side.

I think on this level, the emergent church does have something to teach the rest of us - particularly Dan Kimball’s story. He started Graceland inside an already existing church. They used their facilities so that they didn’t reduplicate and waste money on something that was already there - a building. So they got the benefit of having a building without expending the energy and money of putting it up from scratch.

I’m still chewing on a lot of this.