Creature of the Word lays out this concept in full, first examining the rich, scripture-based beauty of a Jesus-centered church, then clearly providing practical steps toward forming a Jesus-centered church. Authors Matt Chandler, Eric Geiger, and Josh Patterson write what will become a center- ing discussion piece for those whose goal is to be part of a church that has its theology, culture, and practice completely saturated in the gospel.
Creature of the Word lays out this concept in full, first examining the rich, scripture-based beauty of a Jesus-centered church, then clearly providing practical steps toward forming a Jesus-centered church. Authors Matt Chandler, Eric Geiger, and Josh Patterson write what will become a center- ing discussion piece for those whose goal is to be part of a church that has its theology, culture, and practice completely saturated in the gospel.
Creature of the Word: The Jesus-Centered Church
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Creature of the Word: The Jesus-Centered Church
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Overview
Creature of the Word lays out this concept in full, first examining the rich, scripture-based beauty of a Jesus-centered church, then clearly providing practical steps toward forming a Jesus-centered church. Authors Matt Chandler, Eric Geiger, and Josh Patterson write what will become a center- ing discussion piece for those whose goal is to be part of a church that has its theology, culture, and practice completely saturated in the gospel.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781433678639 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | B&H Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
| Age Range: | 3 Months to 18 Years |
About the Author
Actualmente Matt participa en los esfuerzos de plantación de iglesias a nivel tanto local como internacional mediante la Iglesia The Village y diversas alianzas estratégicas. Se desempeña como presidente de Hechos 29, una organización de plantación de iglesias a escala mundial. Durante los 10 últimos años, Hechos 29 surgió de una pequeña congregación y se extendió a unas 500 iglesias en los Estados Unidos y alrededor del Mundo. Además de disertar en conferencias alrededor del mundo, Matt ha escrito varios libros, entre los que se incluyen The Explicit Gospel (El evangelio explícito) y Creature of the Word (Criatura de la Palabra), publicados en abril y octubre de 2012 respectivamente. Aparte de Jesús, su mayor alegría es haberse casado con Lauren y ser el padre de sus tres hijos Audrey, Reid y Norah.
Matt Chandler serves as Lead Pastor of Teaching at The Village Church in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. He came to The Village in December 2002 and describes his tenure as a replanting effort where he was involved in changing the theological and philosophical culture of the congregation. The church has witnessed a tremendous response growing from 160 people to over 11,000 with campuses in Flower Mound, Dallas, Denton and Fort Worth.Matt is currently involved in church planting efforts both locally and internationally through The Village and various strategic partnerships. He serves as president of Acts 29, a worldwide church-planting organization. Over the last 10 years, Acts 29 has emerged from a small band of brothers to nearly 500 churches in the United States and around the world.Beyond speaking at conferences throughout the world, Matt has also written two books, The Explicit Gospel, published in April 2012, and Creature of the Word, released in October 2012. His greatest joy outside of Jesus is being married to Lauren and being a dad to their three children, Audrey, Reid and Norah.
Eric Geiger es el vice presidente de la división de Recursos Humanos de Lifeway. Recibió su doctorado en Liderazgo y Ministerio de Iglesias en el Seminario del Sur. Como pastor también enseña y es orador y asesor para misiones y estrategias de iglesias. Eric es autor y co-autor de diversos libros, incluido el éxito de ventas en libros sobre liderazgo Iglesia Simple. Vive junto a su esposa Kaye y tienen dos hijas, Eden y Evie.
Eric Geiger serves as the vice president of the Church Resource Division at LifeWay Christian Resources. Eric received his doctorate in leadership and church ministry from Southern Seminary. He is also a teaching pastor and a frequent speaker and consultant on church mission and strategy. Eric has authored or co-authored several books including the best-selling church leadership book, Simple Church. He is married to Kaye, and they have two daughters, Eden and Evie.
Josh Patterson serves as lead pastor of Ministry Leadership at The Village Church located in the Dallas/Fort Worth region of Texas. He and his wife, Natalie, are the proud parents of Lily, Luke, and Liv.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A PEOPLE FORMED
It is the promises of God that make the church, and not the church that makes the promises of God.
~ Martin Luther
Pastor barry pulls into his driveway at exactly 12:21 early Sunday afternoon, wondering, How is it that I always arrive home from church at the exact same time every single week?
His day thus far has occurred with the same clockwork precision as all his other Sundays. He rose early to look over his sermon notes. Kissed his kids good-bye shortly after they woke. Hustled off to church for his morning routine: a brief sound check, a walk around the facility, a time of customary prayer with a few men in the church before leading his "pastor's class."
And though he prayed with several more friends immediately before the worship service, he'd be embarrassed to admit he didn't really expect anything special to happen that morning. Just preaching his usual sermon to the usual people — same as last week, same as every week — people who seem unmoved, a church that appears to be barren.
After the worship services, he stood in the back and shook the hands of people he loves and others he tolerates, receiving the same type of casual compliments he hears every week, along with the same few hugs and the same few suggestions.
The same. The same. Always the same.
Even sitting here in his driveway like this, staring at these same green numbers on the same dashboard clock, having plodded his way again through the same routine, everything's playing out the same as every other Sunday. Everything except this ...
He would usually be out of the car and inside by now, if the pattern held true. But today, something's different. The passage he'd just preached this morning is still resonating in his heart, lingering more powerfully than usual. Matthew 16 — about Jesus' promise to build His church, punctuated by the phrase: "the gates of Hades will not overcome it" (v. 18 NIV). That line, that thought, still messing with his mind.
When Jesus spoke of His Church withstanding the gates of Hades, surely this is not what He envisioned — a church without life.
Barry thinks back to his first encounters with Matthew 16 as a young pastor, back when he was convinced that the churches he'd be called to lead throughout his ministry would become unstoppable movements of grace, threatening the very gates of Hades. But today his youthful belief seems replaced by a sinking feeling in his gut, enough that he's started to seriously consider doing something else with his life — not because his love for Jesus has waned, but just because this is not what he envisioned when he committed to pastoring.
He longs for life. And this, well ... this just feels dead. Like he's no longer alive. Inspiring little passion for God among the people in his church, little hunger to worship, little compassion for those in the community. Just a continual cycle of the same lifeless motions.
Why?
Several hours later, across town in a newer neighborhood, Pastor Chase pulls into his driveway. He's been running on adrenaline all day. Huge crowd at church this morning — a big response to the new teaching series his staff has been planning for weeks, one with an edgy title, a tightly produced sermon bumper video, and a crisp assortment of mass marketing packages. It's been a full, bustling day already.
Yet he feels empty inside. Because if next week is anything like past history, the attendance for Part Two of his splashy new teaching series will be way down, and the staff will immediately want to start strategizing for another big launch. Probably on sex. He wonders if his church will set the record for the number of sex series in one year.
Why does it take that? he wonders. Why does everything have to be so forced, so fabricated, built on hype instead of substance? Why this emptiness inside after all the energy they'd generated in the past few hours?
As he sits in his driveway, looking down at his cell phone, friends from his networks are already texting to see how "the big day" went. He knows what they're wanting to hear. Success in ministry still seems defined by Sunday attendance. And based on that scale, his is a growing ministry with attention from all around the country.
Why then does he feel so empty?
He thinks about some of his earlier teaching messages, ones where he knocked and rebuked empty religion and dead rituals. He wonders if his current ministry is just a newer, cooler version of what he once hated. Has he learned how to give the appearance of life without actually being alive? The outside looks so good. Lots of people. Lots of activity. But on the inside he senses minimal life change, minimal spiritual growth. And whatever little there is, it almost seems to happen accidentally amid all the buzz.
On the outside, Chase and Barry could not be any more different. One is wearing jeans with his shirt untucked; the other is still in his suit and tie. One is in an SUV with Coldplay blaring in the background; the other recently noticed the speakers have gone out in his old Camry. One enjoys sushi late at night; the other prefers meat and potatoes — at six, on the dot.
Yet they have much more in common than they realize.
Both men walk into their homes longing for more. One is tired of the deadness; the other is tired of the empty activity.
And what both men need, as well as both of their churches, is a return. They need to return to their first love. A simple, yet significant return to Jesus.
As God said to the church at Ephesus:
I know your works, your labor, and your endurance, and that you cannot tolerate evil. You have tested those who call themselves apostles and are not, and you have found them to be liars. You also possess endurance and have tolerated many things because of My name and have not grown weary. But I have this against you: You have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember then how far you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. (Rev. 2:2–5 HCSB)
Like the church at Ephesus, Barry and Chase are good men for the most part. Both are faithful to their wives. They invest in their children. They work hard and are morally above reproach. Both have continued in the ministry despite difficult days, criticism, and disappointment.
But both of these pastors have slowly lost their awe for Jesus and His finished work. Intellectually, of course, they still hold firmly to the gospel. Each could easily share a snapshot of its truths without thinking hard — a brief, biblical presentation of Jesus and His gracious gift of salvation. Yet they've both learned to rely on other things to form the center of their daily work, to motivate the life and activity of their churches. Their drift has not been one of overt rebellion but of an inner twisting of the heart, a loss of appreciation for the gospel and all its ramifications. Both could articulate the gospel well, but they don't view the essence of the gospel as the foundation for all of ministry.
And that's a huge difference — the difference between knowing the gospel and being consumed by the gospel, being defined by the gospel, being driven by the gospel. It's one thing to see the gospel as an important facet of one's ministry. It's quite another to hold firmly to it as the centerpiece for all a church is and does, to completely orbit around it.
The gospel. Though such a glorious thing, it's also such a simple thing — so simple we almost overlook it. Such a basic thing, we're tempted to feel as if we've somehow graduated beyond it. And yet without this simple thing, this basic thing — without the life-giving gospel driving and defining both us and our churches — there really isn't much of anything that makes us distinct and alive, nothing that other people, groups, and organizations aren't already doing.
And that's where our lives begin to intersect with these two men — where Barry and Chase's names dissolve into the name that's etched on the front of our own Bibles, the name of the guy who uses our deodorant every morning. Us. You. In your heart perhaps — if you're being very honest — you sense a loss of awe for the gospel, a failure to connect its power to your entire ministry. You'd admit you've become distracted by other motivators, impressed by other ways of measuring success and discerning direction.
There is a solution to the death and emptiness. A way back to where we started. But only by returning to a fascination with Christ.
And that's where we all can begin again.
"We were born," Tertullian explained, "for nothing but repentance." As Martin Luther said, "To progress is always to begin again." So here at this place of recognition and regret, we meet together to start a fresh journey into the heart of the gospel, prepared to be newly amazed by it, resolved to let its principles begin shaping how our churches worship, serve, and operate. For just as an individual must continually return to the grace of Jesus for satisfaction and sanctification, a local church must continually return to the gospel as well. Our churches must be fully centered on Jesus and His work, or else death and emptiness is certain, regardless of the worship style or sermon series. Without the gospel, everything in a church is meaningless. And dead.
Distributaries of Death
The 137-mile long Atchafalaya River is a distributary of the Mississippi River that meanders through south central Louisiana and empties into the Gulf of Mexico, serving as a significant source of income for the region because of the many industrial and commercial opportunities it offers. Yet as scenic, productive, and enriching as this river is, it owes all its strength — all of it — to the mighty Mississippi.
That's because a distributary doesn't have its own direct water source; it is an overflow of something else. So when the Mississippi is high, the Atchafalaya is high; and when the Mississippi is low, the Atchafalaya is low. What the Atchafalaya accomplishes depends wholly on something other than itself.
The Church is a lot like the Atchafalaya River. Anything of value she accomplishes is always tied to her source. So if she somehow loses connection with it — with her first love, the Living Word — she loses all power. She dries up and empties. If any church becomes fed by a less potent source, by some other supply system than the gospel of Christ, her level of transformative power is directly affected. It's like trying to overflow the banks of a river with a twelve-ounce bottle of water. Impossible. Pointless.
The Bible, of course, gives us good and right teaching on everything from sex to parenting to money to morals. All good things. Wonderful things. God's design and desire for all of life. But our ability to walk in these truths with freedom and joy — and our church's ability to lead people into this ongoing, abundant-life experience for themselves — is dependent on something else: an accurate and deep understanding of the gospel. That is our Mississippi.
Without a proper understanding of the gospel, people will miss the big biblical picture and all the joyful freedom that comes from living it. They will run from God in shame at their failures instead of running toward Him because of His mercy and grace.
Just as the river forms distributaries, the gospel forms the Church. The distributaries do not form the river, just as the Church does not form the gospel. When a church confuses the order, she loses her true effectiveness. When a church chooses something other than the river of the gospel as the driving force behind her teaching, programming, staffing, and decisions, she empties herself of all power. Instead of becoming a distributor of life, she becomes a distributary of death. She doesn't really have anything else to offer.
That's why we've felt a significant amount of joy in watching what appears to be a resurgence in gospel thinking, writing, and preaching in recent days. When Michael Horton, Trevin Wax, J.D. Greear, Tullian Tchividjian, Greg Gilbert, and a host of others write books explicitly on the gospel, we're encouraged to think we're once again focusing on what is of "first importance."
In addition to books like these, we're seeing connections formed around initiatives like the Gospel Coalition, Together for the Gospel, and endless blogs and banter about the gospel. In all of this, we do need to be careful not to see the term gospel as a sort of junk drawer that holds any and every piece of our theology. Although the gospel does impact everything, everything is not the gospel. If everything about Jesus and the Bible becomes "the gospel" to us, then we end up being gospel-confused rather than gospel-centered. That's why we've chosen to use "The Jesus-Centered Church" instead of "The Gospel-Centered Church" as the subtitle of this book. The gospel centers us on Jesus' person and work or it isn't the gospel ... and it isn't where our first love should be. Ultimately, the gospel is not a nebulous or ethereal concept, but Jesus Himself.
The gospel. What is it, really? In its simplest form, the gospel is God's reconciling work in Christ — that through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, God is making all things new both personally for those who repent and believe, and cosmically as He redeems culture and creation from its subjection to futility.
And that's what this book is about — the Church and the huge implications of this glorious gospel upon her.
Sadly, as in the case with Pastor Barry and Pastor Chase, a big gap exists between understanding the gospel and understanding what the gospel means for the Church. Perhaps this is largely because we tend to think of the gospel as an individual message that causes individual transformation — which is partially true. But the gospel is much more than that. The gospel also forms the church. Scripture says Jesus "gave himself up" for the Church (Eph. 5:25 ESV), buying the Church "with his own blood" (Acts 20:28 ESV), in order "to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works" (Titus 2:14 ESV). The gospel needs to be seen in this total perspective.
The gospel is, of course, for individuals — yes — and it should and ultimately does cause transformation in the life of every person who believes on the Lord Jesus. However, that's only part of what God is accomplishing in His plans to make all things new. And we cannot afford to forget it.
Watching the Story Unfold
When I (Matt) was six years old, my dad took us to see The Empire Strikes Back, the second installment in the original Star Wars trilogy. I have no memory of seeing the first film, which might have given me some context for what I was seeing, but this one just confused me. It seemed like the bad guys were winning at every turn, and Luke (the eventual hero) actually bothered me more than he inspired me. Even at the age of six, I was turned off by his whiny attitude and easily breakable spirit. He almost had me rooting for the Empire instead. I found myself pulling for the ruthless, powerful Darth Vader to hurry up and kill Luke so that Han Solo (the far more manly and capable of the two) could emerge as the new hero. Little did I know I was being set up for another movie that would come out three years later (followed by three more, of course, two decades later).
Genesis 3 is kind of like The Empire Strikes Back — a heartbreaking chapter of the Bible where the bad guys appear to have won a decisive victory. Sin has fractured the "shalom" of the universe. Everything that God had declared "good" is now broken and tainted, and the crown jewel of creation is in outward rebellion, hopelessly broken.
But Genesis 3 is not how the story ends.
God had told Adam and Eve they would die if they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, yet they ate its fruit anyway, bringing spiritual and physical death into the creative order. But not only did God provide a way to clothe their shame and nakedness by slaughtering an animal and crafting garments for them to wear, He also added the whisper of a promise within this dark chapter, declaring that He would one day make all things right again.
God said to the serpent (to Satan, the embodiment of evil, deceit, and death), "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel" (Gen. 3:15 ESV). A man would come, God promised, born of woman, who would crush the head of the enemy once and for all. Yes, this man would be wounded in the process. But the "heel strike" He endured would be nothing compared to the death blow inflicted on His enemy's head.
Time went on and the story continued with God unfolding more and more of how His restoration of all things would occur. In Genesis 12, He came to a man named Abram to give this startling command and promise:
"Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." (vv. 1–3 ESV)
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Creature of the Word"
by .
Copyright © 2012 The Village Church.
Excerpted by permission of B&H Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Endorsements,
Title Page,
Copyright,
Dedication,
Acknowledgements,
Chapter 1: A People Formed,
Chapter 2: The Creature Worships,
Chapter 3: The Creature in Community,
Chapter 4: The Creature Serves,
Chapter 5: The Creature Multiplies,
Chapter 6: Jesus-Centered Culture,
Chapter 7: Preaching the Word,
Chapter 8: Pulpit to Preschool (and Puberty Too),
Chapter 9: The Jesus-Centered Leader,
Chapter 10: Jesus-Centered Flower Committee,
Chapter 11: Jesus-Centered Contextualization,
Chapter 12: Jesus-Centered Ministry,
Conclusion,
Notes,