Paradigm Shift

What is the church? What is a disciple?

How effective are our current methods for making disciples?

Is the way we do church working?

In this episode of the Collaboration podcast we interview Damian Gerke, who literally wrote a book on the paradigm shift the western church needs to make: In the Way – Church as we know it can be a discipleship movement again.

Damian shares his story of serving on staff at a large church and wondering if the methods they were using were actually working. Was it possible to see more individual transformation, more personal engagement with Jesus, more training of the everyday believer as a missionary and disciple-maker? He eventually concluded that the structure of the church itself – the programs and practices, beliefs and values – was “in the way,” of discipleship.

Check out Damian’s book for a winsome explanation of where we are in the western church and how we got here. The bulk of the book is a side by side comparison of “church as we know it” and DMM (disciple-making movements).

What is a disciple - a consumer or a missionary?

What is the church - a location or a people?

What does the church do - run programs or equip workers?

How is the church led - by professionals or lay leaders?

How does the church engage with people - assimilation or mobilization?

How do people engage with the church - attend services or obey Jesus?

Let’s add this one while we’re at it:

How is Jesus perceived - Savior or Lord?

Alan Hirsch expressed this almost twenty years ago in his seminal work, The Forgotten Ways. In the early church the central, driving conviction was “Jesus Christ is Lord.” The natural response to the Lordship of Jesus is obedience-based disciple-making. As disciples obey Jesus they are thrust into mission the way the Lord did it, through incarnational engagement with specific people in a specific place. This is always done in community with other followers of Jesus, creating a transforming “liminality” - an environment of deep personal change. As the gospel is planted and churches form, organic relational systems are built following the balanced diversity of APEST (Eph. 4:11-12): apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers. Hirsch calls these six factors mDNA - the DNA of mission.

Contrast this with “church as we know it” today in the west - which runs on the operating system of church growth. A lot of the time the central message has shifted from “Jesus is Lord” to “come to church.” We still encourage people to “believe in Jesus” but we don’t emphasize obedience or structure accountability because our main goal is to keep people happy and coming and giving and serving and bringing friends.

Notice that structurally it doesn’t look like a simple relational circle anymore. Now it’s an organization run by professional staff members who answer to a governing board whose purpose is to maintain and develop that organization. What is happening in this box is not bad, but is it best? Is it accomplishing the main things we are supposed to be accomplishing?

Lance Ford and Rob Wegner adapted this “starfish and the spider” concept and applied it to the church in their insightful 2021 book, The Starfish and the Spirit. With Hirsch guiding them, they laid out a game plan to shift the American church from pyramid style organization to more fluid, reproducible movement.

Jeff Vanderstelt packaged this same concept beautifully for the individual believer in his 2015 book, Saturate. And John Mark Comer’s brand new Practicing the Way shows how following Jesus is as simple as being with Him, becoming like Him and doing as He did.

Fundamentally, this is a gospel issue. The western church has inadvertantly trained believers to “sprinkle Jesus” into our lives by attending entertaining worship services and engaging in a never-ending buffet of Bible studies and small groups. Like the space ship passengers in the Pixar film Wall-E, Christians have gotten fat consuming what professional pastors have lovingly prepared for us. It’s time to get off the floating recliners, put down the designer coffee, hit the gym and start feeding ourselves. It’s time to truly apprentice ourselves to Jesus, our Master.

But this requires a paradigm shift. Over the next four episodes we will walk through the four shifts outlined by Christ Together in their practical and inspiring Gospel Saturation Primer, leading the church from:

Attendance to transformation

Collection to mobilization

Addition to multiplication

Competition to collaboration

This is not just about updating our programs or adding some new apps. It is about replacing our Operating System. It’s about taking a long, hard look at our beliefs and practices regarding Jesus, the church and the mission. Are we content to keep doing what we have always done and pray that this time it will produce different results? Or are we ready to go back to the Bible, study Jesus and the early church and return to the simple, reproducible practices that drove the movement that changed the world?

Hear this prophetic word from Damian:

“Part of the challenge in getting through the paradigm shift is that what we do (model) has so much more impact than what we say. Meaning: We can preach, admonish, compel and exhort people to know that Jesus is Lord, but they hear that message in the experience of coming and consuming. The model trumps the message.

“What believers need to know (i.e. deeply, through experience: 'ginosko', not just through mental assent: 'eido') is that each of them has been purposefully saved. That purpose goes far beyond their personal eternal condition (which is what we usually limit our salvation messages to)—as wonderful as that is. That purpose includes being the boots on the ground for the kingdom of God expanding until the whole world knows Jesus. God has called every believer to be both Jesus' ambassador and his special operations force. This is our individual identity: to be conformed into the image of the Son. We are each a unique reflection of Jesus, living as he lived in obedience to the Father. This is our collective, corporate identity.

“But Church As We Know It isn't communicating that message through its current form and process—even though that may be the content of the sermon and the programmatic theme of the Sunday morning service. The message being modeled is communicating (unintentionally), ‘You need to come, consume, conform, comply and be comfortable.’”

“Church as we know it can be a discipleship movement again.” Join the conversation! Join the movement!