Matt Carter's Austin Stone Blog

The blog below is from one of the guys on my staff named Michael Stewart.  He is our pastor of community and I love his heart and his fresh approach to church.  I thought I would give him a shot at this blog thing.  You’ll enjoy it!

Matt Carter

Lead Pastor

Austin Stone Community Church

Let me be brutally honest – God’s wrecking me.  We've had a couple of meetings with the guys on staff at the church where we've really wrestled through what true discipleship looks like and why the American church, on the whole, has done a terrible job of producing committed, radical, missional, prayer-besotted, passionate disciples of Jesus Christ. The first part to solution is naming the problem. We're all "rich, young rulers" who have no need of the King of Glory because we're too easily satisfied by the metal and plastic toys of our age.

Because of this and other things, I've really been wrestling about this thing we all call ministry. I'm just not satisfied with current Western paradigms of doing ministry. Come and see, invest and invite, bring 'em to an event... that just doesn't rev my strategic engine anymore. Why do we think that events are the main catalyst for life change?

I'm enamored with what God is doing around the world, though. A church planting movement in a province in India which was once called the "graveyard of missions" is now exploding with people coming to Christ - 1.5 million over the last 10 years to be exact. 30,000 church plants later and they have a real, live revival on their hands. Here's the crazy thing - there's no secrets to their strategy.

Guess what they do? They pray like crazy. They share Christ with anything that moves. They cling to God's Word as completely and universally authoritative. They reproduce themselves in others - immediately and rapidly. They don't have buildings, outside money, or staff. They don't have slick events. They teach everyone, and I mean everyone, to plant churches. And they are some of the most committed and passionate people you will ever meet on the face of the planet. They understand that they have one shot at life, that life is short and unpredictable, that some of their friends will probably die for their faith, that they will definitely incur persecution, that they have been left on planet earth to do some damage for the Kingdom, and that they will go down swinging.

Now, contrast this with your typical Western Christian. We pray when we feel like it, or only if we get into some sort of crisis. We read God's word like it's a newspaper. It might take us 10 years to ever feel "good enough" to sit down and mentor someone. We have plenty of buildings, tons of cash and great big staffs. We love slick events. We think that making disciples is for the few, the proud, the professional. And we get upset if, God forbid, someone challenges to do something other than pray, pay and get out of the way. We believe that we will all live to be approximately 85 years of age, that life is long and predictable (if you can make enough money), that dying for your faith is something that happened 1900 years ago - but not today, that persecution means having someone make fun of the fish on the back of our car, that we have been left on the planet to accumulate as much wealth and stuff as possible, and that we will go down swinging - on the front porch of our assisted living home while sipping lemonade and singing Gaither hymns.  And what’s worse – the aggregate of this is what we call “success”.

Maybe it will take the church of the Global South (Asia, Africa, Latin America) to shame us into waking up to the reality that our King will return and He won't look like the "gentle Jesus, meek and mild" that we all talk about. He will come in triumph. He will come with a sword, and He’s going to take care of business. And in the meantime we are to have the same mentality, taking nothing for granted, provoking our minds to action, and living as if every atom of every particle of every fabric of every thing we do is on mission with God to redeem and renew “that which was lost.”. 

Michael "Stew" Stewart

Pastor of Community

The Austin Stone Community Church

510 South Congress Ave Suite 101

Austin, TX 78704

(512) 708-8860 Phone

(512) 708-8884 Fax

stew@austinstone.org

www.austinstone.org

To be a New Testament church existing for the supremacy of the name and purpose of Jesus Christ

I want to begin by talking about community.  Community seems to be a buzzword in the church today.  Every church pursues it.  Every church spends thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours trying to create it.  Starbucks has taken over the world by offering a counterfeit picture of it.  But what exactly is Biblical community and how can we achieve it?

A good place to start in answering the question by stating what Biblical community is not.

First of all, Biblical community is not a choice.  I can’t tell you how many people I talk to in my church that have excuses for not living life together in Biblical community.  “I don’t have time.  It’s not convenient for me.  I haven’t found a group of people I connect with yet.”  You’ve heard them all before.  But I realized something this week.  To “do life” together like the New Testament church is not a suggestion of God but a command of scripture.  Hebrews 10:25 says “do not forsake the assembling together, which is the habit of some but encouraging one another as you see the day drawing near.” 

If you’re anything like me you have always interpreted that scripture to mean that you shouldn’t skip church.  It does mean that, but the meaning of the text has much further reaching implications.  The key to understanding what the writer of Hebrews is talking about is in the word “forsake”.  It is a much stronger greek verb than to simply “miss out”.  It means to abandon.  The writer of Hebrews is saying, “Don’t quit being the Body!  Don’t quit living in community together.”  Don’t abandon one another.

The realization that hit me, is that when our church members just come to the worship service…hear good preaching….sing to God…..go out to eat with their buds….but it never goes beyond that, they are not just missing out on God’s best….but they are sinning.  A life apart from deep, Biblical community is a life in open rebellion against the Lord.  Those are pretty tough words, but true nonetheless.

Biblical community is hard to achieve.  It takes time.  It’s dirty and it’s bloody.  It’s hard to look your friend in the eyes and tell him that you haven’t felt close to God in three weeks and you don’t have a clue how to reconcile with your wife.  More than that it’s hard to carry your friends baggage and problems when you have enough of your own. 

But regardless, it is God’s plan….and more importantly….it is God’s best.