Posted 162 days ago
Life Covenant Church – A Missional Example
by Tim Morey, Pastor
Describe the small group of those who joined you at the beginning and the date you launched.
Life Covenant Church launched in June 2003 with a core of about 35 people. About 75% of us were in our 20’s or early 30’s, and the remaining 25% was almost entirely empty-nester couples who believed in the vision and wanted to see our city’s younger population impacted for Christ.
Describe the state of Life Covenant today in terms of the numbers and age range.
Life still has roughly the same ratio in terms of age demographics (which has provided for some rich mentoring relationships), now with a sprinkling of older families as well. We are now a community of around 140, including about 25 young children.
Briefly describe the quality of your community at Life Covenant.
Though imperfect of course, most would say a sense of authentic community is one of our greatest strengths. Nearly all of our people are involved in a small group or mentoring relationship which affords them more significant connections with others. Hospitality and shared meals are an important part of Life, and people strive to care for one another in times of difficulty, etc.
Describe briefly the forms of local mission that Life Covenant is involved with, including the two other churches you have planted.
Life has been very blessed to plant two more Southern California churches: Catalyst in Culver City (2006), and Restoration in Redlands (2007). Catalyst is an amazing multicultural/multiethnic church that has a heart for the entertainment community and the urban poor, both of which are prominent in their city. Restoration is probably best thought of as an emerging church, and has a great mix of college students and young families. One of their key involvements is serving AIDS patients in their area. Both of these churches are affiliated with the Evangelical Covenant denomination as well. Life’s local mission includes participation in Sharefest, a joint project with other local churches, where we serve our city through care, cleaning, painting, and restoring of schools, parks, historic sites, and other public spaces, as well as graffiti removal, care for the elderly, etc. We are also involved in a dinner and friendship ministry with homeless people, and with Habitat for Humanity.
Describe global missions at Life Covenant, including the economic project you are involved with.
Life has adopted the African nation of Mozambique, where we are involved in micro-enterprise development among the poorest of the poor, and through a new seminary are developing partnerships with indigenous churches for further relief work and, Lord willing, further indigenous church planting. Our first venture in this country was funding micro-loans (www.opportunity.org) for AIDS widows who have no means of supporting themselves. Through small loans (usually less than $200), potential entrepreneurs receive startup capital for businesses (such as fruit stands, chicken farms, sewing clothing, phone banks, etc.). Basic business and AIDS education is part of the program; as a given loan is paid back, it goes back into the system and funds another potential entrepreneur. This has been an amazing tool in fighting poverty, and does so in a way that gives hope and dignity to those receiving our help.
Describe the percentage of your income that currently supports your mission ventures locally and globally.
Last year approximately one third of our income went to local and global missions.
What percentage of your congregation is involved in ministries in the community or the larger world.
Upwards of 80% of our congregation is actively engaged in ministry.
- Describe how your small groups equip your members to be involved in mission and what they seem to value most about their experiences in reaching out to others.*
Our small groups are quite varied, but all have three goals in mind as they meet: the spiritual formation of believers, reaching out to those outside the church (a fair number of those at Life first became involved through a small group), and mobilizing themselves into compassionate service for others. In integrating these purposes into our groups, we hope to make missional living a normal part of what it means to daily follow Jesus, as opposed to an optional extra.
Background and Lessons
One of the scariest days of my life was the day we started Life Covenant Church. I don’t think I realized how stressed I actually was until I found myself in the back room of our house (aka the church office) wiping sweat from my forehead and trying not to swear out loud at my new printer/copier/fax machine for refusing to give me my notes. People were milling about in our living room (aka the sanctuary), it was ten minutes past our start time, and I felt all at once like crying, throwing up, and hitting my new printer with a hammer. Bundled in among my fears (“What if no one comes? Or if they don’t come back? What if I can’t support myself? Is Starbucks hiring? What does it say about me if I fail?”) was a fear that was less directly tied to my ego, but pressed on me all the same: would we be a church that actually made a difference, or just another bunch of religious consumers? The idea driving us, after all, was not to gather a crowd to hear my wonderful teachings or to create a venue with hipper music than the place down the street – it was to live as a community of people on mission, helping one another become more like Jesus and carrying out his work in the world. If God blessed us with the privilege of making an impact, would we be faithful to step into that opportunity? Or would we end up as a roomful of pew potatoes, our presence on Sundays masking the spiritual lethargy that characterized our daily lives?
This question persists. We’ve done well, and I nearly burst with pride when I see the way our young church has given itself away again and again. At the same time I am amazed by the disproportionate effort needed to maintain an outward focus. Inertia seems to slide a church toward inactivity, the maintaining of the status quo, and the use of our energies only to care for ourselves.
Human nature and spiritual warfare play into this, but I think a profound part of this struggle is theological as well. Some time ago a split occurred between our theology of church and our theology of mission. The church became the white building on the corner where we met for worship and the occasional potluck, and mission became an activity that takes place somewhere else, usually by someone else. The church was meant to feed us; missions were meant to feed others. We did not see ourselves as missionaries, but rather as “ordinary” Christians for whom such activity was purely optional. The emphasis had shifted. The church no longer saw itself as a community of Jesus’ followers living out the mission of God, but as an institution whose primary function was to serve its members. Erwin McManus puts it well: “Our motto degenerated from ‘We are the church, here to serve a lost and dying world,’ to ‘What does the church have to offer me?’”
Too often we approach the local church as consumers, expecting to be served by a church which functions, to use Darrell Guder’s term, as a “vendor of religious services and goods.” Discontent is guaranteed to follow such an outlook, as one is looking for fulfillment in a one-sided spirituality, which is unable to satisfy. Such faith may sustain for a while, but the person whose orientation is primarily one of receiving will eventually become frustrated, wondering why yet another church was unable to meet their needs.
At Life we are attempting to redefine what church is, and to help people see themselves as missionaries, sent intentionally and strategically by God into their particular workplaces, classrooms, and homes. We are learning as we go, but have been deeply blessed by what God has done so far. In our first four years we have been blessed to plant two more churches, and our church has eagerly embraced a goal of planting a new church every year. We have adopted the African nation of Mozambique, one of the poorest and most unreached on the continent, and our people have given sacrificially to see some amazing micro-enterprise work there. As I write this, we are launching a next phase – partnership with a much-needed seminary in Mozambique’s capital. Through this venture we will be working with local churches in leadership development, other forms of relief work, and planting indigenous churches.
In the course of these four years, there are things we’ve done well that have helped us live missionally, and things that, given a do-over, we would probably do differently. Here is a sampling:
[+] We set the bar high.
One of the best things we’ve done as a congregation is to set high standards for what it would mean to be part of this body. From our first core group meeting onward, we’ve emphasized that this was a place for those who wanted to get involved in what God was doing, not just to show up for an hour on Sundays. When we began formal membership, we set the bar even higher, asking people to commit to a “rule of life” of the type that monastic communities use. We want those who call Life their home to not just believe the right things, but to commit to living in the way of Jesus.
This lesson was largely learned from Mosaic in Los Angeles. One of the many amazing things about this church is that they are the largest sender of missionaries in the Southern Baptist denomination. This is no small accomplishment in a denomination which has numerous ten thousand-member churches and which cares so much about global missions. When asked how they do it, Mosaic largely credits this to the radical standard to which they call people as normal Christian living.
[-] We didn’t out-counsel enough.
As much as I said it wasn’t about gathering a crowd, I struggled (and sometimes still struggle – we’re a small congregation) with not gathering a crowd. There is security in seeing a full room and in hearing people exclaim, “We’re growing!” Consequently, there were times when I ignored the Spirit telling me that a person wasn’t a fit, and that if I didn’t address the mismatch there would be bigger headaches down the road. There were.
In the excellent training our denomination gave us we learned a wonderful new term: “out-counseling.” Especially in the early months of a church’s development, it is crucial to pay attention to who is truly embracing the vision, and who sees the new church more like a lump of clay they can shape into the church they’ve always wanted. For those who do not share a missional vision or whose values are consistently out of step with ours, the best thing for all parties is to gently help them out of the church. The truth is that those who don’t want to be missional, but rather are looking primarily for a church to serve them, are going to be miserable and will make everyone around them miserable too.
Though it is awkward, I’ve found that time spent praying together and gently pointing out areas of mismatch is time well spent. It is a tremendous grace, both to the person and to the congregation as a whole, to give a person permission to either adjust their expectations or to move on gracefully to a place that better fits them.
[+] We built community.
Good mission flows out of good community, and to sustain an outward focus, balance is necessary. There is a temptation among missional churches to underestimate the need for community, and to treat “care for the body” as the enemy of “mission.” In reality we can’t treat these as separate entities – they are two sides of the same coin. Seeing that believers are well cared for, connected to others, and growing spiritually is not the enemy of missional living. Rather, the problem is making those things ends in themselves. What Christ is doing in us must be channeled outward into what he would do through us.
You can’t feed others off of an empty plate, and believers who are spiritually hungry themselves will be of little use to starving people. Consequently, we strive for excellence in our worship gatherings and teachings. Before we launched a public worship service, we trained small group leaders and were able to immediately plug new people into these smaller communities where they could grow and be cared for. We put a premium on team-based ministry, and do our best to see that everyone has a role to play. We eat together (meals after worship, dinners in people’s home, etc.) and find that food is a good aide in connecting meaningfully with others. And good connections are necessary to sustain missional focus.
[-] We overestimated how much we cared.
There has only been one time I felt disappointment with our church. Showing up for our costly, well-publicized evangelism training, I was heart-broken to see how few of our people came. As I prayed and looked for a lesson in this, it seemed God was directing my attention to a particular text. I thought of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem, and came to the painful realization that few of us had that kind of heart for lost and hurting people in our city. Perhaps the most painful revelation in this was that I was part of the problem. I didn’t care as much as I liked to portray myself as caring, and I needed God to do a work in my heart. God is growing us in this area, but the growth is not without struggle.
I’m learning a lot about this from my friends at The Rock, a fellow Covenant church in neighboring Manhattan Beach. As a new church plant they had a rough start, and struggled to gain traction. Most of their original core left—they struggled with in-fighting, difficult personalities, etc.—and for a while it didn’t look like they were going to make it. This experience really drove them to prayer, however, and it amazes me the depth of caring that God has produced in them. Mission to their city flows from them naturally because it is their heartbeat – a rhythm they learned as they sought to hear God’s heart.
[+] We kept our focus narrow.
We feel a strong call to plant churches. We have nothing against large churches, but if God blesses us with growth we prefer to express it through church planting. This is a costly commitment in terms of finances and people, and also in terms of what we consequently say no to. Sometimes people ask me if we will ever have our own building. My reply is usually, “I don’t know, but I know we’ll start a lot of churches.” Similarly, in global ministry we are choosing to use our resources to focus on one country long-term rather than give financially and send teams to every opportunity that comes up.
I’ve learned a lot about this from my friend Charles Lee, who pastors a church that exemplifies mission very well (New Hope South Bay in Torrance). This church was started by people with a tremendous commitment to social justice, and though they are small and young, they are having a truly significant impact in the areas of human trafficking, poverty, and orphans. They know this is their calling, and they won’t be distracted by lesser goals.
Focus increases one’s opportunity for impact. Rather than attempting to be all things to all people, we have found that a narrow focus allows us to go deeper in what we see as our unique calling. As we’ve planted churches I’ve been amazed by the joy people display as they sacrifice to make it happen. Last year when we planted our second church, even as they were writing checks people were asking me, “We’re doing this again next year, right?”
Reader Comments