Dear Church Planters

Be unapologetically tethered to the Word, and unconditionally loving of your community. This will likely cause the community to hate you for speaking the truth, and the local churches to hate you for loving the “enemy,” but it's nonetheless the only way God breaks through the barriers of liberalism and conservatism and reveals *Jesus* to people instead of religion or activism.

The great flaw of the Pharisees and the majority of the modernist evangelical community was--and often continues to be--ignoring people and only focusing on performance. Screw the world, it's all about me and my Deity and my performance in making my Deity love me and do good for me. This religion often ignores people--and always ignores compassion--and ultimately leads to either pride or depression. Pride being "I performed well, I made it, look at me, I'm better than all those sinners who aren't meeting my standards," and depression being "I can't do it, I'll never meet those standards, I'm a complete failure with no hope."

The great flaw of the emergent church is "the Word is offensive and spanks my inner-child, let's get together and love people, build community, fingerpaint our feelings, and worship incarnational Jesus as the sky faerie in lavender tights who exists to give us back rubs and free ice cream cones." Ultimately this attracts people to us but not to God, because it ignores the sin condition, and regardless of how many confession sessions we have with one another, until we understand we are failures and rebels against God and are reconciled to God through the atoning work of Christ on the Cross, we cannot please God or have relationship with Him. God is love, but love sure as Hell is not God.

Christ prayed for us that we would not be taken out of the world, but that we would be protected from the evil one. This is a prayer against radical conservatism (modern church) which says "the world is yucky, let's stay in our Christian bubbles and remind ourselves we're right while the world lives homeless, starves to death, and spends eternity in Hell," and against radical liberalism (emergent/post-modern church) which says "there is no evil one, there is no hell, everything is good, let's just accept and love everybody and never feel bad about ourselves." Christ then prays that we will be made like Him by the Truth, the Word of God. The Word causes us to move toward holiness and our love--or rather Christ's love in us--causes us to be involved in the world.

Post-modernity is in large part a response to modern thinking which said there's one way to do things (capitalism, legalism, etc) and if it isn't working we need to do it harder. It is easy to get disenfranchised with the church of the previous generation and say "they did things this way, and it sucked; therefore, we will do things this way, and it will own." Lots of rules last generation? No rules this generation. Right-wing conservatives last generation? Liberal democrats this generation. Modernists last generation? Post-modernists this generation. My prayer is that your movement would never fail to be a response primarily to the Word of God and not merely the culture or previous generation. If we are relevant, may it be because Paul walked through Mars Hill and studied the culture, the poets and the religion, and ministered accordingly, not because our parents' church was irrelevant. If we are loving, may it be because Christ was loving and not because the church we attended as children was not.

The church should not be a replica or reflection of culture, but rather should create culture within the church and use the existing culture as a conduit for evangelism outside of the church (church being movement of people, not building of bricks).

To quote Mark Driscoll the church exists to be a city within the city. A city that loves Jesus, knows their Bibles, and literally creates a culture that can bless other nations/cultures by loving and serving them. In this way, as the Word is preached through culturally relevent and accessable mediums, and as God opens eyes and hearts to see Jesus and causes them to respond in repentance, those outside the church will see this counter-culture doing life differently and say "hey, I want that," repent of their sin, trust in Jesus, and become adopted into the church where they expand the growth of this city within the city.

If the church is loving Jesus and living by His Spirit and Word, it will reflect a small, flawed reflection of what shalom in Eden looked like and what the new humanity will look like when Christ returns... absence of sin, war, strife, and suffering but also the presence of love, peace, harmony, and health (Acts 2-ish)... If that's what the church looks like, than those outside the church will want to join in. If the church does not value anything different than the city, then it will offer no appeal to culture, it will not reflect the Body of Christ, and it will not bring Glory to God. Because it always sucks when God looks down at his Body and says “that looks nothing like me.”

Therefore, as Christians we must use every cultural medium as a conduit of the gospel--i.e. media, txting, facebook, coffee houses-- to start conversations and share the Word with others. But as the church we must not allow the culture to influence us to the extent that we are also individualistic when the Bible screams community, that we are also materialistic when the Bible screams simplicity, that we are also prejudice when the Bible screams racial harmony, that we are all apathetic sinners when the Bible screams repent, and that we are all religious pricks, when the Bible screams love your neighbor as yourself....

Ultimately, may your hearts be engulfed in a passion for Christ to be treasured supremely above all things in every heart in your community in a response to the faithful teaching of Scriptures by any cultural means possible for the Glory of God and the good of His people.