Ben Sternke

Field notes on life and mission with God in post-Christendom

missional church

Kingdom-Minded & City-Focused

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Three years ago our family and a few others embarked on a journey of planting a church. Our hearts’ desire was to cultivate “kingdom beachheads” all over our city, attempting to put discipleship and mission at the center of what we were doing. Like many, we found out that it was more difficult and humbling than we imagined, but God has been faithfully leading us into fruitfulness as we follow the promptings of his Spirit.

Some interesting recent Spirit-promptings have led us in a direction that was initially surprising to us, but in the end felt natural and right. As so often happens when the Holy Spirit is involved, no one could have guessed it from the beginning, but in the end we laugh about how God is accomplishing his will through it all: we are in the process of grafting our church together with another to form one network of Missional Communities in Fort Wayne.

Since this blog is dedicated to sharing what we are learning in church-planting and disciple-making, I wanted to take a few posts and outline what has been happening and how we came to this decision.

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On Wine and Wineskins

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One of the things I look for in people is their ability to embrace a both/and reality, an ability to hold two things together that most people keep separate. For example, one of the things I have always appreciated about Mike Breen and the organization he leads, 3DM, is that they very intentionally embrace two things that are often kept separate in many people’s thought and practice: God’s power and strategic thinking.

It seems that some people are very serious about our need for God’s power to accomplish God’s mission, but they tend not to worry too much about structure, method, or strategy. They think if we can just get people in a room and see a few miracles, the world will be changed.

Others are always thinking about how to better organize things, thinking strategically about structure and method, but rely very little, if at all, on God’s power as a factor in their practice of mission. They think if we can just get our method right we’ll change the world.

But what if we really need both?

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Stop Doubting and Believe

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The story of the resurrected Jesus appearing to Thomas showed up in the Moravian text readings a few Sundays ago. You may know the story: Thomas was not with the disciples when Jesus first appeared to them, so he doubted the veracity of the story, saying “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” Jesus obliges Thomas when he appears to the disciples again, and Thomas believes.

Many of the sermons I’ve heard on this passage are quick to point out that it’s okay to doubt, that we’re too hard on Thomas, that we should be asking questions and “testing everything.” But I am struck by the fact that Jesus tells Thomas the exact opposite. He offers his scars for Thomas to see and touch, but also says to him, “Stop doubting and believe.”

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Why It’s Hard to Invest in Exponential Growth

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You’ve probably heard most of the illustrations about the power of exponential growth vs. linear growth. For example, if you were able to keep folding a piece of paper in half indefinitely (essentially doubling its height every fold), it would only take you 42 folds to reach the moon. Or, if you started with one dollar and doubled your money every day, by the end of the first week you’d have $64. But by the end of the first month you’d have $268,435,456!

When you think about it, making disciples of Jesus could be like this. If I make, say, 8 disciples, and they all make 6 disciples each, and all of those people make 4 disciples each, you end up with 248 disciples of Jesus by the third generation. The exponential equation only gets more incredible after that. And all I have to do in the first generation is make 8 disciples. So why do we find it hard to invest our energy in making disciples who can make disciples? I can think of a couple reasons.

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Centralization Before Decentralization

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Why do some missional ventures that look so good “on paper” fail so miserably in real life? Why do some of the best-laid plans for mission end up not actually accomplishing all that much? Because of how I’m wired up, I have a propensity to believe that an efficient system, a simple plan, an elegant strategy should automatically yield good results. But this just isn’t the case sometimes. Why is that?

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