Difficult, not complicated

Today I went to get my dressing changed. Piece of cake, I thought, not complicated. Until the dressing came off, and I’m staring at a 9 inch red wound across my chest with a fat red tube sticking out the bottom, held on to my innards, apparently, with skinny blue sewing thread. Suddenly I was nauseous and light-headed and had to lie down. There is more to this than I was expecting. Not complicated. Just difficult.

Difficult. Not complicated. It’s good to know the difference.

In one of my posts about church, I said that we should always be creating ways to worship and obey God in community with one another. I grew up watching this happen in Honduras, and more than anything, this has given me confidence that starting churches in new places might be difficult, but it’s not complicated.

When I was four, my dad took us to live in a small town in Honduras so he could teach at a Bible school there. When he arrived, he found eight young, single men living in a tiny brick building, and he set out to give them a few years of teaching at a junior high level. After they graduated, they planned to move into the city where established churches would hire them as pastors.  Meanwhile, thousands of villages, who lacked the money and status to hire these graduates, had no churches at all. Soon after he arrived, my dad realized the school model didn’t work in rural Honduras.

So, having heard about pastoral training by extension from a Presbyterian missionary in Guatemala named Ralph Winter, Dad took a risk and closed the Bible school, sold the property, and set up training through the local church. He began by mentoring mature, family men. He asked them about their contacts in the surrounding villages, and together they went to the homes of these contacts and led whole families to Jesus, right there in those thatched, adobe huts. Together they baptized the new believing families and taught them to reach out to their neighbors. Together they established the families as churches that met, worshipped God, taught one another, cared for one another, and grew. Soon there were dozens of these baby congregations. Then hundreds. Most of the pastors were only semi-literate, so they taught themselves to read their Bibles and their training booklets. (Such a push for literacy followed a burning desire to read the Bible, similar to what happened during the Reformation when the Bible first appeared in local languages.)

Then something sad happened. Some of the graduates of the Bible school became angry. They visited the new congregations and told them that they were not real churches and that their leaders were not real pastors because they were not educated. They even tried to get Dad expelled from the country.

Dad had a crisis on his hands. He went back to the Bible and studied. He came up with this idea. In the Great Commission, Jesus tells his disciples to make disciples, baptizing them into God’s family, and teaching them to obey “all the things I have commanded you.” If you stop and think about that, these commands are not hard to list. They can be summarized in a handful of key principles like Repent, Love, Disciple…etc.

My dad taught those baby Honduran congregations with their semi-literate pastors these basic commands of Christ. They realized that if they were obeying the “everything I have commanded you,” then they were, indeed, true churches, and their leaders were, indeed, true shepherds.

When I talk to new cross-cultural workers about starting churches where there are none, I borrow someone’s smart phone and lay it on the table. “Is there anyone here that can build one of these from scratch?” I ask. “Do you know what the parts are, and how they fit together?”

I think we have the impression that starting a church is like building a smart phone. But it doesn’t have to be. As one church planter put it, “If a guy can grill hot dogs and invite the neighbors over, he can start a group.” Because there it is. If leaders can practice hospitality and engage their neighbors, then they are on their way. It might have more to do with character, and less to do with expertise.

 I think church can be as simple as sitting in a living room and laying out wine and bread (or juice and crackers, or coke and tortillas) on a coffee table with the rest of God’s family gathered around.  It probably shouldn’t stick to that scenario, but it’s beginning enough. If “two or more” can guess at how to do the “all things” Christ taught us, I think that’s all it takes to start.  The “all things” might be difficult (that “love your neighbor” thing gets me every time”), but they aren’t hard to understand, not complicated. Isn’t Jesus a genius? He gets me every time, too.