As I mentioned a week or two ago, Eikon is planting into a second city, launching an expression of Eikon in Denver, Colorado. Currently I’m in Denver for the launch of this new community with the couple leading the plant, Alex and Katey Johnson. Yesterday, Eikon Denver had their first Core Group gathering, and tonight, they are holding an Informational Meeting with another 30-40 people interested in joining the Core Group. I’ll do another post later in the week with more thoughts, pictures and reflections, but I wanted to share the following for today’s post. Alex put together what I think is a killer framing narrative for introducing the kinds of churches we are planting within the larger Eikon Community and I wanted to share it. It’s a portion of his talk, not the whole thing. So this portion deals with the problem (part 1 of his talk), while part 2 deals with the solution: Discipleship.
Enjoy. 
_________________________
Have any of you seen the movie Waiting for Guffman? It’s one of my personal favorites. Depending on your sense of humor, it’s a great way to spend an evening. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s a mockumentary about a small town in Missouri called Blaine who are preparing to celebrate their sequicentennial anniversary and the central part of the celebration is a musical put on by the locals. You’ll have to watch the movie for the full effect, but it’s quite funny.
Most sequicentennials aren’t that funny, but this one is funny because of what they are celebrating. The irony is in the fact that Blaine is celebrating it’s history of being a group of people who never made it to their destination! This group had set out to reach California, and never made it because their leader somehow managed to convince them that rural Missouri was, in fact, the shores of sunny California!
This particular story is quite funny and fictional. But if you do a bit of research into the California gold rush in the mid-19th century, you’ll find that this story happens to be quite real.
In the early part of the 1800’s gold was found in California and word began to reach the east coast that there was gold and beautiful land and oceans and warm weather – essentially they found paradise! Don’t think modern LA, this was before all that. You can only imagine living on a farm in Pennsylvania and hearing that you could be farming land in a place that has warm winters and gold just waiting for your shovel to be found! People began the race to get out to California.
Some people made it, but not as many initially as you may have thought. Only several thousand made it out in the first years of the gold rush, as we know it now. But there was a fascinating by-product of the gold rush: The population of the Midwest went through the roof! Settlers set out with reports of gold and lush farmland located right on the Pacific Ocean, but most didn’t make it. Most stopped in places like Kansas or Missouri or Denver. Just like the town Blaine in the movie, many towns across the Midwest were started by groups of people who gave up! People who set out for California, but never made it to their destination.
Some didn’t make it because their leaders didn’t know how to lead them there.
Some didn’t make it because their leaders duped them into thinking they had made it to California.
Some didn’t make it because the journey was simply too hard. (Could you imagine coming across the plains and seeing what we see from here?)
In Waiting for Guffman we laugh at this story. But in real life it’s actually a sad story. Those who never made it to California were doomed to suffer two fates:
1. Some were doomed to live under a false belief – believing that they had made it to California or that in fact, California did not exist.
2. Some were doomed to live in Kansas knowing that they simply didn’t have they didn’t have leaders who could get them there.
I can’t tell which I think is worse: settling by a lake in Kansas and being told that I made it to California. Or settling by a lake in Kansas and being told that our leader brought us all this way, but doesn’t know how to navigate the rest of the way!
One way, I spend the rest of my life wondering – this is it? This is as good as it gets? Or the other way, I just spend my time resenting my leaders and myself for not possessing the knowledge or courage to get our group to the promised land.
Many towns across the Midwest and rocky mountain region, if you trace back their history, you will find similar stories about their founding.
Though this part of history is past, the stories of the early pioneers seem to parallel that of the American church quite well. In generations past, the church has been in the business of telling people that California existed and showing them how to get there. The Church, while not providing hope of a life in California, has been in the business of providing the Good News! of hope of a better life – a Godly life – telling people that it’s possible to have a life that is eternal in both quantity and quality. Telling us that we can have lives that are dominated by love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, kindness, goodness, faithfulness and self-control – and that you don’t have to wait until you die, but you can have it now and you can have it FOREVER!!!
And they weren’t just there to tell you about it, but they were there to show you the way.
But we don’t hear much about that life anymore when we go to church on the weekends. And we don’t see much of it in the lives of those who still attend. If the Good News that Jesus has to offer us – that through his death on a cross that we can have real LIFE – why is it that when we come to church the main topic discussed in our sermons is not how to have LIFE, but how to deal with your sin!?! Or that faith is really about getting you to heaven??! Why is it that when people are asked to describe Christians, the top phrases they use are: “anti-homosexual, judgmental, hypocritical, too involved in politics, out of touch with reality, old-fashioned, insensitive to others, boring, intolerant, and confusing.”
And why is it that generation after generation we are seeing attendance at church drop – so dramatically that only 4% of my generation – generation Y or Millenials – are going to church?
65% of the Builder Generations
35% of the Boomers
15% of GenXer’s
Only 4% of millenials.
Looks to me that just like those early pioneers, the Church is struggling to reach its destination. It seems to me, that just like those early pioneers, the Church has stopped short, setup shop on the plains and resigned themselves to the same fates as the pioneers.
Living life believing that the life Jesus calls us to cannot be had. Living life believing that that life is possible, but just not knowing how to get there.
In his book The Weight of Glory, CS Lewis sees this same pattern and notes:
“We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
I can’t count the number of people I’ve spoken with who have come to know Jesus and read about the life that he offers in the Scriptures, only to be sorely disappointed when they go to church. And it’s because they read the Bible and the read stories about what life is like on the beaches of California, and they come to church and find a group of people who are content to make mud-pies in Kansas.
That’s a great way to frame it. I like where this is going!
I wonder if he’ll offend Kansasians though
I’m anticipating a Kansasian revolt on my blog. A boycott is imminent. But come on…if you go to Kansas and then go to California…
Amen and amen. Kansas sounds like central NY, except we’re buried in snow. Looking forward to reading more.
Love this analogy. Its hard to deny that the inherited church tends to move to the goalposts on discipleship; apparently if we go to church, don’t sin too badly (or at least publicly) and (if we’re very committed) do a “quiet time” then we’re doing well. Maybe not.