Sneaky Sunday discipleship you might be missing
Mike Hickerson, Lead Pastor at Mission Church in Ventura CA, starts his messages with some variation of the same 2-minute spiel.
“Hi, My name is Mike, honored to be the Lead Pastor at Mission Church. I love our church. We exist to help people find and follow Christ. We believe that anyone is welcome, change is possible, and that there really is hope for every single one of us - not because we’re awesome, but because God is. He looked down at humanity, we were a mess, we rebelled, we broke the relationship, and he sent his best, Jesus, into the mess to rescue us - for the worst of us, and the worst in us.
I don’t know where you’re walking in today, love God or hate God, love church or hate church… but we call a truce every Sunday and say if God really is who he says he is, and he really will do all he’s promised to do, then that’s really great news for all of us…”
Then most weeks, he’ll do the same thing - he’ll have everyone turn to each other and say “you’re not perfect” and then joke about how they’ll get defensive and say “well… YOU’RE not perfect!”.
It’s a modern liturgy at its finest.
When I was on staff at Mission, I would often get asked why Mike would spend valuable time doing the same thing in almost every message. They were wondering if it’d be more important to teach for 2-3 more minutes, or if the “white noise” for regular attenders would be damaging.
And at first, I would always say that it was for the new person - they’re always out there, and they always need to hear that. It’s incredibly effective for setting up the culture and values at Mission, and paving the way for that new person, who is probably (and hopefully) far from God, to be at ease and really hear the rest of the message.
But after a while, I started to tell them that it wasn’t just for new people - it was for them.
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God designed our brains to thrive on imitation. That means as they constantly take in information, they store what they see and hear for future use. A huge amount of what we do each day is spontaneous - we don’t spend minutes on end using our cognitive “thinking” brains to logically decide what to do when someone drops something in front of us. We just pick it up and give it back!
Now that’s an easy one… because most people do that. Sure, some make a joke, some smile, some don’t - but overall, it’s pretty straightforward.
But what about when someone cuts you off in traffic? Do you honk? Slow down? Speed up and ride their tail? Yell at them? Sigh loudly in disgust? Explain to someone else in the car that that’s dangerous and they’re really dumb? Or maybe justify it for them: “Maybe they’re on their way to the hospital or something”?
Whatever you do, I’d guess that it’s strikingly similar to what you’ve seen others do most throughout your life.
The unconscious right half of our brains are scanning our surroundings 6 times per second trying to integrate “who we are” with “what we do”. Our unconscious brains determine our spontaneous reactions - the ones we don’t have time to “think about”. And those spontaneous reactions are determined by scanning a massive collection of past images and memories of what they’ve seen done in the past. Maybe it’s something funny and quirky that my family did all my life. Or maybe it’s something damaging that I would never want to do, but I’ve still seen done a thousand times.
Helping people follow Jesus means giving them something to imitate.
From the moment they come into our care, they are building up a new collection of images to inform their future actions. Thinking about spiritual formation like this way has tons of implications.
It means we have to get people into real-life situations with each other, not just constructed environments.
It means we have to tell better stories when we teach to give people images of the real world instead of just ideas about it.
And it means we have to reconsider how we talk on Sundays.
If we don’t talk to the non-Christian in the room on a Sunday, our Christians won’t learn how to talk to them outside the room the rest of the week.
When we talk to Christians at church in a churchy way, and then tell them to go talk to their Nonchristian friends in a way they’ll understand, we set them up for failure.
We give them marching orders, but don’t equip them to live them out. Instead, we need to arm and equip them with the HOW. They need to hear the salty phrases, the hope-filled jargon, the actual words they can go out and use in their real lives with their real friends so that their conversations are full of grace and wildly compelling.
The way WE speak IN church will be the way THEY speak ABOUT church (and about Jesus) to their friends. We are building their new vocabulary, and we need to choose wisely.
• • • • • • • • • •
That’s why I started telling people at Mission that Mike’s beginning spiel was for them - not just for the outsider. It was an intentional piece of the discipleship puzzle.
And it wasn’t theory - I heard it confirmed time and time again. Longtime Mission people would tell me stories about how conversations with unchurched friends and family members, and every time I’d hear the same phrases that we all heard every Sunday, and in so many other environments. And the best part was… it was completely natural.
When we consistently talk in a way that disarms the skeptic, welcomes the stranger, gives hope to the broken, and invites the outcast home… then the people we lead will do the same naturally.
