Book Review: Going Deep by Gordon MacDonald

I first read Ordering Your Private World by Gordon MacDonald while still in college in the late 80s, and I've been a fan ever since. From early pastoral success to public sin to healing and restoration, I've enjoyed his writing and been inspired by his life. I still remember a somewhat heated "discussion" I had with a now well-known pastor/evangelist at an FCA retreat about whether or not someone caught in adultery had forfeited the opportunity to pastor, and Gordon was my exhibit A for "yes, God uses broken people." (NOTE: I wanted to say God ONLY uses broken people, but that's for another post.)

Now, in his newest book, Going Deep, Gordon once again impresses me. The 3.5 consistent readers of my blog know my struggles with the modern-traditional church in the US. I teeter on the line between emergent and irreligious, while still basically staying connected to my church. My ecclesiology leads me to see many of today's US churches as too large, too unrelational, and too trapped in "where would you go if you died tonight?" programs OR so far moved away from biblical truth that they've become irrelevant. I've always wondered what it might look like for a modern-traditional church/pastor to adopt wholeheartedly a biblical view of community and discipleship and work to reform his/her local church.

Enter Going Deep. I don't know enough about MacDonald's church to know how accurate the book is on implementation, but from the standpoint of how it might look, it's right on. Written in the same semi-fictional style as Who Stole My Church? and Brian McLaren's A New Kind of Christian series, Going Deep tells the story of a fictional New England congregation pastored by GMac (Gordon) and his wife Gail, who he says are the only two non-fictional characters in the story. The plot revolves around Pastor GMac's engagement with his neighbors, his Bible, and his own congregants about becoming "deep" people. An overarching early theme is that teachability is important, but growability is key. Like plants, we all need to grow deep roots in order to flourish outwardly. We need to be deep people.

The congregation goes through a 1 year process that takes a group of willing believers and challenges them in weekly gatherings of community to become deeper men and women. There are difficult commitments that are asked for and made (could "take up your cross" not involve difficult commitments?). Prior to the group starting, Gordon explored what it means to be a deep person, connecting with people from various walks of life, including a Jewish rabbi and an HR leader tasked with training "up & comers" in her company. All in all, this little group becomes what in my ecclesiology IS the church--a small group of people living life together and seeking to participate in and expand the kingdom of heaven.

But the most amazing thing about the book is how Gordon puts in the context of the modern-traditional church (which I define as the prototypical late 20th century evangelical USAmerican church) and shows how this might work. I've said many times that most large churches today are NOT churches, they are weekly gatherings of many smaller churches, along with some religious people, some bystanders, some outsiders, and some lone-wolf Christians. The senior pastor is often not pastoral at all, but a gifted communicator and leader. This book codifies that thought, and works to build one deep church within the congregation (including some outsiders), and then after that first year the members of that church will start their own churches, with new members from within and without the original congregation. It's a phenomenal concept that I'd love to see more current churches try.

I highly recommend this book. I give it 5 out of 5 bellybuttons in the Phatter book club.

Thoughts on leadership at my church...

My church has started a leader's blog, and I put my first post today. In response to a question about the difference between discipleship, mentoring, and leadership...here's what I wrote:

There is a real sense in which your non-Walgreens [who was saying his most sought-after quality in people he hired was clarity] guy was whining for a world that is gone, and may not come back. Clarity--the world in the 19th and 20th centuries really believed that science would provide clarity to the mysteries of the world, only to have deeper mysteries revealed. Unfortunately, the modern church offered a reactive kind of "clarity" that was, as John Walters hints, unauthentic. I was there. When I was 22, there were 4,036 things that I KNEW clearly to be black and white. I spoke about them on TV, I debated them on the student union grounds. I was full of clarity. And now, almost 20 years later, I think I was wrong on many (most?) of those issues.

I now have about 4 or 5 issues that are non-negotiables for me (see, I don't even have clarity on how many there are!), issues that I will stake my life on and live or die by. I personally believe that discipleship happens away from the center of clarity and at the margins of life, where real life challenges faith and faith sometimes falters, sometimes steps up and responds, knowing God loves regardless of the circumstances.

Discipling, mentoring, leading--like most other words in our culture, they change in meaning with the times in which we live. They have meanings that we pour into them depending on the circumstances we're in. 10 years ago leadership was all the buzz, and, quite frankly, both inside and outside the church we hyped everyone up into thinking they were or could be leaders.
Unspoken common sense said "Uh, not all at the same time you can't."

Our lives have both intentional and unintentional impacts on those around us. To me, mentoring has an intentionality about it at least on the part of the mentor. Disciple, in its NT form, is an apprentice, something that our 21st century world has no clue about. We no longer apprentice ourselves to other people to learn a trade--that left with the onset of the industrial revolution and the rise of the modern university. Leadership is whatever Jim Collins, Tom Peters, Bill Hybels, John Maxwell or Bono happens to say it is at the moment.

The real truth for me is the management and mystery of our relationships. Management because there can be a "sweet science" to the intentionality we take to impact the world through relationships. Mystery because the reality is often that we are the proverbial blind beggars who have only caught a brief flash of the light and nourishment of God and we're groping in that direction, hoping we're moving rightly and not alone.

Where are all the saints?

Okay, so I have lots of favorite authors. It happens when you read a lot. But another one of my favorites is Gordon MacDonald. Gordon first said something in my life when I was still in college and David Kemerling gave me a copy of "Ordering Your Private World." But it was when I read "Rebuilding Your Broken World" after he was caught in an immoral situation that I really started to like Gordon's writing. He writes periodically for Leadership, which I read on the Chrstianity Today website. Today he started with this quote:

"A walloping great congregation is fine and fun, but what most communities really need is a couple of saints. The tragedy is that they may well be there in embryo, waiting to be discovered, waiting to be emancipated from the cult of the mediocre." Martin Thornton

I don't know who Martin Thornton is or where Gordon got this quote, but it's spot on. Gordon then writes briefly, but in his own generalization, edgy sarcastic way (his words) this thought: the modern Evangelical church sucks at mentoring mature Christians.

What does it mean to be mature? Gordon rightly acknowledges that a definition doesn't just leap out at you. But you know it when you see it. Here's his thoughts...

"The marks of maturity? Self-sustaining in spiritual devotions. Wise in human relationships. Humble and serving. Comfortable and functional in the everyday world where people of faith can be in short supply. Substantial in conversation; prudent in acquisition; respectful in conflict; faithful in commitments."

The only thing I would add to this list would be something about an appropriately serious but playful joy about life.

Gordon is also right when he diagnoses a main part of the problem as our propensity for programming everything. Since a certain kind of evangelism (the kind where you convince someone that they are going to hell without Jesus if they die tonight; true enough, but hardly the whole gospel message) can be programmed somewhat, and since "infant-level discipleship" can be programmed somewhat, plus worship, preaching, etc. all of which seemingly can be programmed, maybe we've just forgotten that maturity only happens when life is placed alongside life, and the apprentice learns from the master. It only happens in real situations, not in sanitized sanctuaries or Bible studies. It happens when people who are apprentices of Jesus spend time with other people. They succeed together and fail together and learn together and serve together and eat together and cry together and drink together and worship together and smoke together and play golf together and wait for their kids to get out of football practice together and have dessert together and lose weight together...okay, I'm sure you get the point.

It's together in all its messiness.

Christ the Teacher

What has happened to make evangelicalism a shell of its former glory? Dallas Willard points to one main reason as the loss of the identity of Jesus as our Teacher.

Salvation by grace through faith is one of the great truths that emerged in the Protestant Reformation. But grace is so misunderstood; we tend to think of grace as the opposite of effort. If effort is involved, then it was not grace.

But this just isn't true. Effort isn't the opposite of grace, earning is. In fact, grace stimulates a ton of effort. Willard cites the great missionaries of the 19th century as examples. But people today misunderstand grace as no effort.

A second factor he mentions is one of the results of the modernist/fundamentalist debates. "Jesus as Teacher" sometimes became liberal modernist code-speak for Jesus is only human. So fundamentalists rejected the phrase. Unfortunately that also meant they eventually rejected the truth--that Jesus is our Master Teacher, and we are to be his disciples or apprentices in how to live life. Evangelicalism by and large no longer teaches that we are to be disciples of Jesus as Christians. Most churches even allow for someone to be a Christian without being a disciple.

Jesus came to do more than help us manage our sin, obtain forgiveness, and escape hell. He came to teach us how to live.