Articles
Home
Introduction
What is Church?
The Gift of Community
Joining God's Mission
Apprentices of Jesus
Comfortably Numb
Finding Jesus
Rediscovering Essence
Subversive Community
This Way of Life
Some Basic Questions
Word, Work, Worship

Contact
Mike Bishop
email

Friends
The Well
Mike & Amber's Blog
Mike Bourque
John Husband
T Freeman
Brant Hansen
Alan Creech
Liz Creech
Beth Keck
Eric Keck
Molly Bean
Bill Bean
Chris Marshall
Glenn Johnson
Jason Evans
Kevin Rains
Amy Palmer
Ryan Hale
Urban Youth Impact
Tom & Lisa Ponchak
Mark & Ali Bishop

Resources
Allelon
Cntr. for Parish Dev.
Richard Foster
N.T. Wright
Next-Wave
Northumbria Comm.
Servant Leadership Sch
Dallas Willard
John Wimber
The Vineyard
Vineyard Bible Institute

 

What is Church?
The Story of How We Got Here

by Mike Bishop

I met my wife Amber while we were both attending the University of Florida in Gainesville.  At the time, I was training to become an engineer and Amber was planning on moving overseas to become a missionary.  Eventually I won her over (to marriage) and then she won me over (to missions).  We had lots of ideas, but during my last semester in college, we were direction-less, jobless, and almost hopeless.

During these years, I had a low opinion of the church.  We both attended a Vineyard church on Sundays and occasionally came to a home group, but all my Christian community was found in para-church organizations.  We had been involved in Campus Crusade at U.F. and we were looking at YWAM (Youth With a Mission) for possible missions opportunities.  The church was behind the times in my view—lack of vision, zeal, evangelistic fervor—whatever you want to call it.  But this little Vineyard church was beginning to change my perspective.  Maybe there was hope for the church after all.

Sometime during that semester (spring of 1996), we had a meeting with the pastor and his wife (Arty and Jackie Hart) and told them about our dilemma.  I had not interviewed for any jobs because we were still deciding our next move.  That night, they gently began challenging our assumptions about church and what we saw as ‘traditional’ ministry.  I had no desire to pastor, but maybe we could find a place on a church staff somewhere.  Or, as they suggested, why don’t we get jobs and wait for God to open some doors?

So that’s what we did—I took an engineering job in Gainesville and Amber eventually started teaching music.  Over the next couple of years we helped launch a college ministry, lead worship on Sunday mornings, started home groups, went on short-term mission trips to Cuba, and basically showed up anytime the doors were open.  We became part of a family and began to recognize our gifts as leaders, pastors, and fire-starters.  I was still reluctant about the whole pastor thing, but slowly God began showing me his plan for the future.

In 1997, there were a few events and specific prophetic words that lead us to actively pursue church planting.  This part of the story is too long to tell here, but in a nutshell I became convinced that God had a specific calling to a place within a few years.  I wasn’t sure of the place (Amber knew before me but God didn’t allow her to tell) so I pursued training with the hope that we’d know soon.  From the fall of 1998 to the summer of 2000, I attended Vineyard Leadership Institute, a school based in Columbus, Ohio.  VLI had just started an at-a-distance program which myself and a friend took from Gainesville.

Here’s an interesting side note at this point.  We met Kim and T Freeman during the fall of 1996 and became fast friends.  We would often joke about planting a church together one day, but I always figured we’d end up in different time zones.  That’s how Gainesville is – you know people for a few years and then you never see them again. B ut we kept up a friendship, even through some rough times, and held our collective breath to see where God would send us.

VLI was a killer – classes, studying, working a full-time job, leading small groups and worship on Sundays, trying to have a marriage – it was taking a huge toll on my life with God.  One semester I was taking a class on spiritual disciplines and the professor assigned an “accountability exercise” the first day of class.  We were to take a few hours to pray and journal on a weekly basis and he would keep us accountable (somehow, he didn’t tell us how) at the end of the course.  Well, I was so busy, I forgot.  Question one on the final exam was “Did you complete the accountability exercise – yes or no - 15 points?”

That was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me spiritually.  Growing up in the evangelical church, I had put so much guilt on myself for my lack of discipline that any hope of rightly relating to God was gone.  In many ways I was living an empty Christianity – one that pursued ministry over simple communion with Jesus.  I felt incapable of “spending time with God”.  He was very far away and I was very tired.

What came next can only be described as a spiritual revolution in my heart.  I began to envision my relationship with God having a new foundation – love.  Slowly the old habits and priorities began to change into a relentless pursuit of the kingdom of God.  This revolution began to affect my relationship with the church and my job as a leader.  The people of God began to look like people again instead of “resources to allocate.”  They were “living stones”, not the dead stones I was trying to use to build my building.

One morning around this time I was praying at home looking out into my back yard.  My eyes drifted to a tall pine tree.  God began to speak to me that I was that tree – friendship with him was growing the tree straight and tall.  Then I remembered something I’d heard about pine trees.  Shipbuilders used them for masts because of their height and strength.  In my mind I saw a picture of an old Spanish Galleon, a sailing ship of war.  The ship was the community of faith God had in our future, and there were many masts and many sails.  Then a remarkable thing happened – the image zoomed out and I saw countless ships arranged in a battle formation.  The word that came to mind was “Armada”.  And I knew where God was going.

That day and for the next few weeks I began to formulate a vision for the church God wanted to build.  What if church looked less like independent battleships and more like an Armada?  Instead of trying to encompass everything under one roof, why don’t we join forces?  I began to see that maybe churches should be small units of kingdom people who gather together to celebrate their faith in small ways, but as a whole they subvert the kingdom of darkness on a large scale.  Our American obsession with “bigger is better” has duped us into believing church must be big to be “successful”.  Well, what is success in the kingdom of God?  Is it building a monument to myself that one day will be torn down to build other monuments?  Or does success have more to do with faithfulness, obedience, and love?

In January of 2001, we knew West Palm was the place God was sending us, but we had no timeline.  Our friends Kim and T Freeman had already moved here, but we had placed no expectations on their involvement.  In February of that year we felt led to announce to the church that we would be moving sometime in 2001.  Amber was pregnant with our first child, Jackson, and we began to run out of money quick.  In April, we lost 75% of our income for the summer months.  After some intense prayer and wrestling with God, we decided it was time.  So June 3, 2001, we left our family in Gainesville to find a new one in West Palm Beach.
 

For the first few months, Amber and I did nothing but rest and wait for the baby to arrive.  Over the years since, I have had many pastors and leaders ask me what they should do when they leave a leadership position to discover what God has for them next.  My advice is simple...most of them need to "detox" from church.  Ministry in many ways can be like an addiction; a co-dependent relationship with the group of people you lead.  They use you for your "services", you use them for your ego and self-worth.  It is very difficult to hear the voice of God when you are trapped in co-dependency.  Taking time to be separate from the typical patterns of church is critical.   This does not necessarily mean you need to be isolated (although long periods of silence and solitude are highly recommended), but intentionally keeping things simple will allow new light to break though.  For us, we spent many hours just spending time being quiet, reading, or relaxing.  We ate dinner often with my brother and sister-in-law, Mark and Ali Bishop, and the Freemans.  But mostly, we focused on giving God the space to re-energize us and prepare us for the next stage.

The baby was born in August and our new faith community began to meet together for worship.  During the first year, we spent most of our time working though some important questions together.  What is church?  What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus?  Who is a leader in Jesus' church?  We did not anticipate quick answers but rather sought to discover God's unique calling for us as a community.  Slowly, we began to connect with a few others here and there, but we understood that we could no longer equate success with numbers of people attending a service.  Instead, we focused on becoming salt and light in the world in our families and jobs. 

In March of 2002, I started whatischurch.com and a blog that would eventually become The Mustard Seed.  Within a few months, I discovered that our little community was definitely not alone.  I began to get emails from people all over the country and as far away as New Zealand.  The questions we were asking and our story seemed to be repeating itself all over.  Eventually some of these people who we met through blogging became friends and partners (see links at left).

Four years later (I am writing this in December 2006), our community exists as two home-based churches.  We meet together once a month to take the Lord's Supper together and reconnect.  But the heartbeat of our community exists in the people who have determined to live their entire lives in the flow of God's kingdom.  We have very little in the way of traditional church activities.  But, if you spend any time with us, you will immediately recognize that we are a family.

The Family of God is an overused but underrated metaphor.  I’ve met many Christians that may call you “brother” but you wonder what they really mean.  If church has more to do with relationship than “growing my ministry,” maybe we should reconsider the family metaphor.  Maybe we really are a family, “joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grow[ing] and build[ing] itself up in love, as each part does its work.” (Eph. 4:16)  Maybe there is a connection between us that goes deeper than our similar socio-economic status and mutual affinity.  Maybe Christ really is our Head, and we can call each other “brother” and “sister” because of him.  Maybe we’ll even be able to call the “outcasts” our brothers and sisters because of Jesus.  “The community of Christians springs solely from the Biblical and Reformation message of the justification of man through grace alone…Not what a man is in himself as a Christian, his spirituality and piety, constitutes the basis of our community. What determines our brotherhood is what that man is by reason of Christ. Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Life Together”)