I've been told that I'm a pastor with weird gifts. I've had my church budget reduced to zero because I invested too much in outreach, and had my church services led by people in flip-flops and jeans called "cute" from the main stage of regional meetings. After planting 3 1/2 churches (the half is the one that didn't work), working on multiple large church staffs, traveling to train ministries across the country, I started to figure out why.
Ok, the people who helped me learn to live as a Christian weren't really wolves- but something about how they taught me to live created a discontent with the status quo and a real hunger to see God's Kingdom expressed here on earth.
I came to Christ at a YMCA camp with the influence of a winsome executive director and his family, who had a passion for Christ. The local Christian church I joined gave me a solid grounding in the basics of my faith, but then I met people who shook things up.
Randy Watson was a missionary focused on U.S. outreach who led weekly door-to-door evangelism. That became my regular Saturday routine as a young high school student; that was about knocking on doors (often alone), asking people if they wanted to know Jesus.
I signed up for Campus Crusade's national effort in 1977, and visited adults and families who expressed interest. Picture a high school student going to family homes to help them come to Christ.
Youth for Christ came to my campus, where I was leading Bible studies at lunch, and I learned from watching the local director Sam Estes, about the vision to win a whole campus to Christ.
My next church home, made church planting the normal experience. I was involved in helping with logistics for church plants and church renewal across Southern California's northern Los Angeles region. I knew lots of church planters, and saw them before and after they started. Dennis Easter taught me that I was a fully authorized representative of God's Kingdom, and it wasn't just theory.
The church sent youth leaders to spend a week in Colorado learning from Ralph Moore, the author of Starting a New Church, a man instrumental in more than 1,000 church plants.
A memorable teacher at Life Pacific, put the shoe leather in outreach as told the stories of walking home down Sunset Blvd after every evening class so he love on people along a tough stretch of L.A. culture.
After college, my home church sent me to fix a bit of a mess in a desert community. I stayed and planted a church, and then a couple more.
I could go on...
You can see from the list that it wasn't a series of infomercials or even great books that put me on a collision course with mission. It was rubbing shoulders with people who were living it out. None of these people were doing church as usual. Each one of them believed that God's work was alive, and that it often happened on the margin of the normal experience of church. And they added shoe leather to that belief.
I don't know if anyone called them weird, but what this series of relationships did for me was to do what Paul told Timothy he needed in 2 Timothy 1:6 - "fan into flame the gift of God." And while I was impacted deeply by all the great teaching and preaching along the way, you can't teach your way into mission. You can only experience it.
If you believe in the local church, as I do, and you also believe in the mission, it's obvious that we've separated the two. Mission for the most part, occurs "out there." It's found in some foreign mission trips or by sponsoring missionaries. But the inclusion of mission in the discipleship process is supposed to be baked into what it means to be a disciple.
I'm deeply grateful to the Lord for orchestrating the journey that put me on a path that has looked very different than what many Christians experience. My experience of being raised in faith around people who were radically and aggressively on mission may not be the norm today, but it was the context of discipleship in the early church.
Join me in shifting from one person's experience, to the early history of Jesus followers.
Starting on sun-scorched Cyprus and reaching to the philosophical mess of Athens, from the busy port of Corinth into the very heart of Rome itself, teams with an apostolic mission fanned out across the ancient Mediterranean world with a reach that was amazing even to those who lived at that time.
The historian Eusebius records that the disciples were "dispersed throughout the world." The list is long with Thomas into Parthia, Andrew into Scythia, John across Asia Minor, Peter through Pontus, Galatia, Bithynia, Cappadocia — every name a compass point on a map of radical geographic ambition. Paul's teams alone travelled thousands of miles of Roman roads and sea routes, planting churches in regional capitals and small towns alike. His activity allowed him to write to the Romans that he had "fully proclaimed the gospel from Jerusalem all the way around to Illyricum." These were not tours through friendly territory: they moved through cities where idol-makers rioted, magistrates flogged, and mobs stoned.
These varied teams crossed into Macedonia in response to a dream, sailed through storm-battered waters, and debated in the marketplaces of cities where no one had yet heard the name of Christ. This tradition expanded far beyond the 12 Apostles, with The Didache (an early Christian church handbook completed between 50 and 120 A.D.) recording the fact that by the late first century, traveling apostles and prophets were arriving regularly in communities across Syria and beyond.
There were so many teams that local churches needed written rules about how long to host them and what to give them when they left — it's a powerful insight into how dense the network had become and just how the work of the Apostle, Prophet, and Evangelist had become the norm. According to this document, early Christians everywhere would have regularly experienced these traveling teams.
Clement of Rome, writing from the capital of the empire to a congregation in Greece, speaks of Paul teaching "righteousness to the whole world" and reaching "the extreme limit of the west," Ignatius of Antioch (50 to 117 AD), under armed guard on a road headed toward his own execution, was still coordinating letter-carriers and messages between churches scattered across Asia Minor and Syria.
What made this spread so amazing was not Roman infrastructure, though the roads and sea routes helped, but the intentional, interlocking teams themselves — co-workers sent ahead, patrons funding the journey, letter-bearers interpreting the correspondence, local leaders appointed and left behind — a living web of people, stretching from the eastern frontier of the empire to its Atlantic edge, bound together not by an institution but by a shared mission and a passion that the whole inhabited world was their field.
The experience and life of mission was the air that every Christian learned to breathe in the early church. Stories of exploits, persecution, salvations, and miracles were part of local church life carried by the teams that visited. Whether they joined the team or not, this was the context of discipleship.
These early Christians were raised by wolves, too. An experience that is wild and heart and transformative. It's easy to think that this is something that cannot be recaptured in the Western church. After all most of our lands are already evangelized?
But are they? Are there not tribes and sectors of our society that are still far away from Christ? is the culture not crying out for incarnational Christians to demonstrate the life of Jesus in the context of business, education, culture, and family?
Discipleship is about context. It's about every Christian rubbing shoulders, experiencing and taking risks, talking about their encounters, and hearing from those who take even bigger risks for the Gospel. It's about awakening (or rekindling, as in Paul's instruction to Timothy), the fire for the Gospel.
If the average Christian only meets people who mostly don't do anything Christian except go to church or home groups, they will never experience mission. We need more than occasional one-week mission trips or missions banquets that get us excited. Those stories help, but they are all about God's Kingdom showing up somewhere else - not here.
Where to rekindle the fire? Where to find some wolves? One place is in the lives of entrepreneurs who are already leaning into what it means to be disruptive to culture. They've got the fire, and many have the gifts; what they need now is the discipleship that gives them the message. They need it from the church. But we don't dare tame them away from taking risks, lest we grind down the very thing that could make them so powerful.
It's not really that hard. We just need to find some needs around us, identify the people that God is already putting his finger on, and then turn them loose. It's about stoking up the fire with some risk takers and then putting them on the platform to tell the real stories of doing hard things. Then let them recruit teams from our church to do some hard things together. If American culture is resistant to the Gospel, the solution isn't to avoid a confrontation, but to cultivate an environment where we have the grit to do hard things.
It turns out that being raised by wolves wasn't so bad after all.