THE COOKIES STILL SUCK OR (WHAT THE CHURCH NEEDS NOW) OR WHAT'S ON MY MIND THAT'S KEEPING ME FROM BLOGGING.

What the Church Needs Now is kind of a bold title for an article, but it carries with it a bit of irony. There is a bunch I think the church in America needs; join the club, right? I'll get to one specific item in a few sentences, but here's a thought before I get there. What if the church doesn't need anything now. Maybe that's part of the problem. We are always looking for solutions to fix the church's problems right now. We go through a period of disillusionment with the status quo, leave and begin looking for greener pastures, and almost immediately reorganize into something with basically the same values and culture as the place we left. The model might be tweaked a bit, but the fundamental patterns of church life remain.

I used to recommend that people leaving church staff or other leadership positions take at least 6 months to a year to detox from ingrown, destructive patterns before setting out to start something new. Now I wonder if that time frame needs to be more like five to ten years. The Apostle Paul immersed himself in life with Jesus for fourteen years before his real ministry began. For someone who was forcefully upholding the Jewish way of life, it probably took that long for him to learn how to minister to people the way Jesus did. If our ministries have had their foundation in numbers, programs, and mechanisms of success achievement, then perhaps we need the same retraining.

What the church needs are leaders willing to be retrained in the way of Jesus. This training will not come from a seminar or book or by copying some famous Christian celebrity. The first step, bluntly, is to die to the American way of getting things done. This transition will not happen efficiently or autonomously. This is old school ancient, eastern, Mr. Miyagi kind of training. You can't buy your way through it faster and you can't get it done alone. If you try to short-circuit the training and get through it quicker (and I'm speaking from experience here), you go backwards and everything gets longer. If you go into it looking for inspiration, or as Peterson says in the Message, "homeowner improvements to your standard of living," you'll get your butt handed to you. I've had mine handed to me so many times I'm wondering how my pants stay up. If you doubt me in any of this, go read an old saint of your choice. The older the better. (Now you know why so many old men have no butt:)

Recently we took the Lord's Supper with our church family. My wife Amber spent time talking with the kids about the nature of communion and asking them some questions. One question she asked was, "What do think happens to God's people when they take communion?" Our oldest, who is five, responded, "I think God gives us courage."

Courage.

What if what we need is courageous people to lead the church, and that courage only comes as a gift of God through an act of worship and obedience? Maybe in God's economy, gifting doesn't mean a thing when it comes to leadership. Maybe skills don't matter. Education. Experience. Previous success. Makes no difference. Maybe what we need are people who live in spite of questions and fear, fail regularly, get frustrated, pour their souls out to those precious few around them, and then stubbornly return to the One who is overseeing every aspect of the process.

Things are beginning to get much simpler for me...and more difficult. The choices are clearer...and more scary. God doesn't want a repackaged, band-aided American church culture anymore and he is sick and tired of poster-boy leaders who gloss over the stark realities of becoming a disciple of Jesus. I just received Dallas Willard's new book in the mail today, The Great Omission, and a line immediately stuck out to me from the jacket blurb: "Willard boldly challenges the thought that we can be Christians without being disciples, or call ourselves Christians without applying this understanding of life in the Kingdom of God to every aspect of life on earth." To address this claim, which I think is accurate, a new kind of leader is required. That is the challenge being offered to all of us.