Integrating Missionally

Walt Kallestad, originally uploaded by David Phillips.

It was good to hear Walt Kallestad tonight at the Allelon Summer Institute at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, CA. Walt is the pastor of the Community of Joy in Phoenix, AZ and the author of Entertainment Evangelism.

Tonight, Walt shared the story of how he came to the realization that he had built a consumer-driven church (of multiple thousands, I might add) and something just wasn’t right. After a time of exploration and prayer as a result of a heart attack which came after building a new 200 acre campus, Walt came to the understanding that things had to change. He began a period of study and reflection and talked with many in ministry.

The end result of this journey was that he went to his staff and told them that they were moving from an attractional model to a missional model. He told his elders the direction his ministry must take, and told them, (paraphrase) “If this isn’t the way you sense the church needs to go, then I offer my resignation”. All the elders but 1 supported him. He stood before the church and repented of what he had done.

The result: they’ve had over 2000 people leave, and he’s alright with it. And it doesn’t bother him, because he understands that a missional model is a Biblical model, and his call is to be faithful to the scriptures. Anything outside the scriptures, he said, “is just your opinion.”

He talked about reclaiming Christ, starting with the scriptures and not culture, and re-forming the people for the new task at hand. He fired half of their staff in one day – they were not ready nor willing to make the move. They went from hiring excellence to raising up leaders and empowering them to experiment and fail.

I’ve been reading Eugene Peterson’s “The Jesus Way” and he talks so much about how we have been blinded by our consumer culture and as a result we build a consumer church. Even most of our worship is consumer-oriented, an expression of Baalism, he calls it. Much of what he and Kallestad said tonight were in sync. We need to be careful of how we build “our” church!

Walt will be exposing more of this over the next few days during our time together. I look forward to him sharing his heart.

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