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What is Church?
The Story of How We Got Here
by Mike Bishop
I met my wife Amber while we were both attending the
University of Florida in Gainesville. At the time, I was training to
become an engineer and Amber was planning on moving overseas to become a
missionary. Eventually I won her over (to marriage) and then she won me
over (to missions). We had lots of ideas, but during my last semester in
college, we were direction-less, jobless, and almost hopeless.
During these years, I had a low opinion of the church. We both attended a
Vineyard church on
Sundays and occasionally came to a home group, but all my Christian
community was found in para-church organizations. We had been involved in
Campus Crusade at U.F. and we were looking at YWAM (Youth With a Mission)
for possible missions opportunities. The church was behind the times in
my view—lack of vision, zeal, evangelistic fervor—whatever you want to
call it. But this little Vineyard church was beginning to change my
perspective. Maybe there was hope for the church after all.
Sometime during that semester (spring of 1996), we had a meeting with the
pastor and his wife (Arty and Jackie Hart) and told them about our
dilemma. I had not interviewed for any jobs because we were still
deciding our next move. That night, they gently began challenging our
assumptions about church and what we saw as ‘traditional’ ministry. I had
no desire to pastor, but maybe we could find a place on a church staff
somewhere. Or, as they suggested, why don’t we get jobs and wait for God
to open some doors?
So that’s what we did—I took an engineering job in Gainesville and Amber
eventually started teaching music. Over the next couple of years we
helped launch a college ministry, lead worship on Sunday mornings, started
home groups, went on short-term mission trips to Cuba, and basically
showed up anytime the doors were open. We became part of a family and
began to recognize our gifts as leaders, pastors, and fire-starters. I
was still reluctant about the whole pastor thing, but slowly God began
showing me his plan for the future.
In 1997, there were a few events and specific prophetic words that lead us
to actively pursue church planting. This part of the story is too long to
tell here, but in a nutshell I became convinced that God had a specific
calling to a place within a few years. I wasn’t sure of the place (Amber
knew before me but God didn’t allow her to tell) so I pursued training
with the hope that we’d know soon. From the fall of 1998 to the summer of
2000, I attended Vineyard Leadership
Institute, a school based in Columbus, Ohio. VLI had just started an
at-a-distance program which myself and a friend took from Gainesville.
Here’s an interesting side note at this point. We met Kim and
T Freeman during the
fall of 1996 and became fast friends. We would often joke about planting
a church together one day, but I always figured we’d end up in different
time zones. That’s how Gainesville is – you know people for a few years
and then you never see them again. B ut we kept up a friendship, even
through some rough times, and held our collective breath to see where God
would send us.
VLI was a killer – classes, studying, working a full-time job, leading
small groups and worship on Sundays, trying to have a marriage – it was
taking a huge toll on my life with God. One semester I was taking a class
on spiritual disciplines and the professor assigned an “accountability
exercise” the first day of class. We were to take a few hours to pray and
journal on a weekly basis and he would keep us accountable (somehow, he
didn’t tell us how) at the end of the course. Well, I was so busy, I
forgot. Question one on the final exam was “Did you complete the
accountability exercise – yes or no - 15 points?”
That was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me spiritually.
Growing up in the evangelical church, I had put so much guilt on myself
for my lack of discipline that any hope of rightly relating to God was
gone. In many ways I was living an empty Christianity – one that pursued
ministry over simple communion with Jesus. I felt incapable of “spending
time with God”. He was very far away and I was very tired.
What came next can only be described as a spiritual revolution in my
heart. I began to envision my relationship with God having a new
foundation – love. Slowly the old habits and priorities began to change
into a relentless pursuit of the kingdom of God. This revolution began to
affect my relationship with the church and my job as a leader. The people
of God began to look like people again instead of “resources to
allocate.” They were “living stones”, not the dead stones I was trying to
use to build my building.
One morning around this time I was praying at home looking out into my
back yard. My eyes drifted to a tall pine tree. God began to speak to me
that I was that tree – friendship with him was growing the tree straight
and tall. Then I remembered something I’d heard about pine trees.
Shipbuilders used them for masts because of their height and strength. In
my mind I saw a picture of an old Spanish Galleon, a sailing ship of war.
The ship was the community of faith God had in our future, and there were
many masts and many sails. Then a remarkable thing happened – the image
zoomed out and I saw countless ships arranged in a battle formation. The
word that came to mind was “Armada”. And I knew where God was going.
That day and for the next few weeks I began to formulate a vision for the
church God wanted to build. What if church looked less like independent
battleships and more like an Armada? Instead of trying to encompass
everything under one roof, why don’t we join forces? I began to see that
maybe churches should be small units of kingdom people who gather together
to celebrate their faith in small ways, but as a whole they subvert the
kingdom of darkness on a large scale. Our American obsession with “bigger
is better” has duped us into believing church must be big to be
“successful”. Well, what is success in the kingdom of God? Is it
building a monument to myself that one day will be torn down to build
other monuments? Or does success have more to do with faithfulness,
obedience, and love?
In January of 2001, we knew West Palm was the place God was sending us,
but we had no timeline. Our friends Kim and T Freeman had already moved
here, but we had placed no expectations on their involvement. In February
of that year we felt led to announce to the church that we would be moving
sometime in 2001. Amber was pregnant with our first child, Jackson, and
we began to run out of money quick. In April, we lost 75% of our income
for the summer months. After some intense prayer and wrestling with God,
we decided it was time. So June 3, 2001, we left our family in
Gainesville to find a new one in West Palm Beach.
For the first few months, Amber and I did nothing but
rest and wait for the baby to arrive. Over the years since, I have had
many pastors and leaders ask me what they should do when they leave a
leadership position to discover what God has for them next. My advice is
simple...most of them need to "detox" from church. Ministry in many ways
can be like an addiction; a co-dependent relationship with the group of
people you lead. They use you for your "services", you use them for your
ego and self-worth. It is very difficult to hear the voice of God when
you are trapped in co-dependency. Taking time to be separate from the
typical patterns of church is critical. This does not necessarily mean
you need to be isolated (although long periods of silence and solitude are
highly recommended), but intentionally keeping things simple will allow
new light to break though. For us, we spent many hours just spending time
being quiet, reading, or relaxing. We ate dinner often with my brother
and sister-in-law, Mark and Ali Bishop, and the Freemans. But mostly, we
focused on giving God the space to re-energize us and prepare us for the
next stage.
The baby was born in August and our new faith
community began to meet together for worship. During the first year, we
spent most of our time working though some important questions together.
What is church? What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus? Who is a
leader in Jesus' church? We did not anticipate quick answers but rather
sought to discover God's unique calling for us as a community. Slowly, we
began to connect with a few others here and there, but we understood that
we could no longer equate success with numbers of people attending a
service. Instead, we focused on becoming salt and light in the world in
our families and jobs.
In March of 2002, I started
whatischurch.com and a blog
that would eventually become
The Mustard Seed. Within a few months, I discovered that our little
community was definitely not alone. I began to get emails from people all
over the country and as far away as New Zealand. The questions we were
asking and our story seemed to be repeating itself all over. Eventually
some of these people who we met through blogging became friends and
partners (see links at left).
Four years later (I am writing this in December
2006), our community exists as two home-based churches. We meet together
once a month to take the Lord's Supper together and reconnect. But the
heartbeat of our community exists in the people who have determined to
live their entire lives in the flow of God's kingdom. We have very little
in the way of traditional church activities. But, if you spend any time
with us, you will immediately recognize that we are a family.
The Family of God is an overused but underrated metaphor. I’ve met many
Christians that may call you “brother” but you wonder what they really
mean. If church has more to do with relationship than “growing my
ministry,” maybe we should reconsider the family metaphor. Maybe we
really are a family, “joined and held together by every supporting
ligament, grow[ing] and build[ing] itself up in love, as each part does
its work.” (Eph. 4:16) Maybe there is a connection between us that goes
deeper than our similar socio-economic status and mutual affinity. Maybe
Christ really is our Head, and we can call each other “brother” and
“sister” because of him. Maybe we’ll even be able to call the “outcasts”
our brothers and sisters because of Jesus. “The community of
Christians springs solely from the Biblical and Reformation message of the
justification of man through grace alone…Not what a man is in himself as a
Christian, his spirituality and piety, constitutes the basis of our
community. What determines our brotherhood is what that man is by reason
of Christ. Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ
has done to both of us.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Life Together”)
Mike Bishop is a
husband, father of three, thinker, trying-to-be-apprentice-of-Jesus,
ecclesial trouble-maker, and wanna-be engineer. His wife Amber and family
have spent the past seven years in South Florida with a rag-tag community
of saints called The Well. Mike’s passion is to see normal people fall in
love with Jesus and be able to realize their kingdom-born dreams. His
blog, other writings, and contact information can be found at
www.whatischurch.com. Articles can be re-printed with permission
- email: bish at whatischurch dot com |