Deep and Wide

“I like what I do poorly better than what you don’t do at all.”

I don’t know who said it, or even if I got the quote correct but that message was dancing around in my head almost the entire time I was listening to, and disagreeing with, Andy Stanley’s latest book Deep & Wide.

To say that Stanley’s vision of what church is, and should be is different than mine would be an understatement. He is a mega church pastor with mega church pedigree, running a Willow Creek style seeker sensitive model in the southern US, and he is very good at what he does. His presentations are slick his church is trendy, his budget is enormous and after listening to him tell his story in great detail in the first part of this book it seems at times that he almost falls into success. I am not that guy. I pastor a small church in the great white north, I am not trendy, photogenic, relevant or entirely comfortable with the attractional ministry model that Stanley shamelessly adheres to. At least once per chapter Stanley challenges his reader (listener in my case) to give his model a chance even though he’s well aware that a great many of them will strenuously object to his methods and practices and I admit that I frequently fell in to that group – yet I couldn’t get past that quote in my mind.

Does God prefer what Andy Stanley does poorly to what I don’t do at all?

That’s the question that this book raised for me. I have been heavily influenced by the small organic church model in the last number of years, a model that focus more on doing things right than doing things effectively. It’s about preaching an ‘authentic’ Christianity, and organising an ‘authentic’ church – one that is stridently countercultural in many obvious ways. My model of ministry has been about ruthlessly eradicating cultural syncretism from the church whenever I was confronted by it (and knowing that there is far more syncretism than I will ever likely be aware of), the biggest and most obvious source of which in my culture is consumerism. Yet in his first or second chapter (the problem with audio books is referencing quotes and ideas) Stanley boldly proclaims that since the culture he is in is full of consumers that he will win them with consumerism. He maintains that that was how Jesus preached. And he’s got chapter and verse to support his claim.

It’s funny though – the other people (pastors, scholars, philosophers) that I have been listening to claim the opposite. That Jesus was ruthlessly countercultural and that the hard words of the Gospel demonstrate a Messiah who had little tolerance for the status quo; and they have chapter and verse to support their ideas too!

And that’s where another famous quote comes to mind: “What you win them with, is what you win them to.” And I don’t want to be winning people to some watered down consumer Christianity.

But as a consequence I’m not winning very many. I’d like to believe I’m planting a lot of seeds but if I’m honest, I’m not pulling in much of the harvest. Perhaps that’s not my calling; I do better with helping the garden grow (or is that God’s job? Too many metaphors get intertwined).  And so I’m left at the end of Andy Stanley’s book with more questions than answers. I can’t write him off as some misguided false prophet because he is passionate about the gospel, and because his method and strategy for living it out is so well constructed and thought out. If he is erring, he is erring with a heart chasing after Jesus and the best of intentions. And God is blessing his ministry. And in truth there was a lot of great stuff in the book that I did find myself agreeing with, but it was more the peripheral issues at the core I’m still not sold.

Perhaps this is the type of stretching that God wants to accomplish in my life. Perhaps these are the types of questions that I need to be asking. I don’t know exactly but for now my heart is unsettled and I’m not sure I like that feeling. That’s it. No real application. No real axe to grind or challenge to issue, just good honest wrestling with things. I thought I’d share my musings with you.

Until next time,

Blessings.