Weโre continuing to explore the โImmersive Community of Formationโ as a solution to the Three Primary Problems currently facing the West. But is an โICFโ simply another term for corporate worship, community group, small group, family, or close friendship? Or is an ICF something different, specific, and particular to our time and circumstances? Letโs dig in.
TRANSCRIPTION
Basics of a Greenhouse
Here on Soil and Roots, we explore the journey of discipleship from some different angles.ย We explore our spiritual formation from the concept of ideas: assumptions, conclusions, and principles that form our hearts, but of which we typically arenโt even conscious.ย Though we are powered and governed by ideas, we rarely pause to identify and dig into them.
Ideas have a great impact on us, but they also govern entire nations.ย Ideas are one of the most powerful things on earth.
There are two sets of ideas: those from the Kingdom of Light and those from the domain of darkness. Godโs ideas lead to our blessing and flourishing. Ideas of darkness are designed to kill us.
And the human heart, which we also refer to here as our roots, is planted in soil.ย Our soils contain both ideas of light and ideas of darkness.ย A disciple, in one sense, is someone whose ideas of darkness are being transformed into ideas of light over time.
Sometimes good ideas, ideas of light, may be forgotten, reduced, or even corrupted.
Weโve looked at the Idea of the Gospel, and weโve explored how weโve forgotten or lost the majestic Gospel of the Kingdom and reduced it to a very personal, very individualistic Gospel of Justification.
The fact that weโve lost, or reduced, the Gospel of the Kingdom over the past few hundred years in the West has resulted in Three Primary Problems: the Forgotten Kingdom, the Discipleship Dilemma, and the Formation Gap.
This entire season is focused on that third problem, the Formation Gap.
The point of discipleship is that we become more like Jesus, from the inside out.
Weโve explored the fact that human beings require five things for that to happen: intensive time, specific habits, intentional community, appropriate intimacy, and repetitive, increasingly complex instruction.
And weโre now rounding the corner on our exploration of community, the third key element.ย Weโll spend a few more weeks digging into community, and then weโll head into an overview of intimacy and instruction.
Weโll wrap up Season 3 by providing very tangible, practical definitions and guides for forming and facilitating what we view as the solution to the Formation Gap: the Immersive Community of Formation, or what we call a Greenhouse.
In fact, this type of community solves all three primary problems.
Is Greenhouse likeโฆ
Iโve mentioned that the Soil and Roots community continues to grow, and that interest in addressing the Three Primary Problems grows with it.
A while back, some friends of mine came alongside, and we decided to form a think tank of sorts to debate, discuss, and prayerfully drive the Soil and Roots effort forward.
We recently gathered for a weekend retreat and spent a lot of time exploring and adding definition to five-element communities.
But I realized that, at one point, we were all responding to this novel concept the way human beings respond to anything new.ย We immediately try to associate something new with something weโre already familiar with.
For example, a friend of ours has a weekly family night, and his rather large clan gets together for dinner and to catch up. And someone asked if that is a Greenhouse.
Kyle has two very close friends, and they talk separately regularly. Often, the conversation deepens and may include confession, spiritual matters, and giving counsel.ย Kyle asked if that sort of friendship is a Greenhouse.
Another friend goes on an annual mission trip with the same group of people, and that tends to be highly formative, because theyโre serving together in a different country and are being discipled through the experience of serving. Is that a five-element community?
Someone brought up Sunday school, community groups, small groups, and Bible studies.ย Arenโt all of those examples of immersive communities?
Theyโre all fantastic gatherings of people, and they can certainly all be formative.ย But in most cases, they’re not the same as a Greenhouse.
A Specific Community for a Specific Time
Remember, the Greenhouse exists as a specific community in a specific time.
The Three Primary Problems have not been primary problems for every generation.
Some generations ago had a very clear understanding of the Kingdom. Not every generation has faced a Discipleship Dilemma โ the early church had a clear understanding that the point of apprenticing with Jesus was to become more like Him.
And we may be the only ones of a few generations that face the Formation Gap.ย Remember, much of human history was shaped by very different, unconscious assumptions about community.ย Growing up and depending on a community larger than just one family was not a luxury like it is for many of us today โ in many cases, it was just a necessity, or at least an assumed way of life.
So no, Greenhouses aren’t the same as your worship service, your community group, your deep friendships, or your family nights. ย Those are all fantastic thingsโฆletโs keep doing them.ย And itโs a very human, very natural thing to try to place this new term, โGreenhouse,โ in context with something with which weโre already familiar.
Remember, the purpose and function of a five-element community are specific to this period and designed to solve the Three Primary Problems.
The Basics of a Greenhouse
A five-element community is defined by these three things: teaching and living the Kingdom, becoming more like Jesus as we explore our own hearts, and doing so in intentional, immersive communities.
So, if your church service or Sunday school, your family, or your Bible study is defined by these three things, itโs probably like a Greenhouse.ย If not, itโs not.
Letโs break these three definitions down a bit more.
The Forgotten Kingdom
In the last episode,ย Kyle asked what teaching and living the Kingdom look like.
Over at the Colson Center, Michael Craven wrote a great article on the Kingdom. This is what he says,
โThe gospel (or โgood newsโ) cannot be fully understood and applied apart from the kingdom of God. Once properly connected to the kingdom, we can then understand and recover the full scope and meaning of the gospel. The fact is, we think we understand the gospel in Americaโbut the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that most of us simply do not understand this most fundamental aspect of the Christian faith.
In a tragic turn of events that began in the nineteenth century with the rise of Revivalism, the gospel of the kingdom has suffered a gradual reduction to merely โthe gospel,โ a term meant to emphasize only the personal plan of salvation.
This reduction stripped the gospel of its cosmic dimensions, which transcend oneโs personal salvation to include the whole of Godโs redemptive mission in the world (i.e., the missio Dei) in which He is making all things new through Christ.
George Hunsbergerย makes the point, โThis separation has made salvation a private event by dividing โmy personal salvationโ from the advent of Godโs healing reign over all the world.โ In the wake of this reduction, the church’s proclamation shifted from โRepent, receive Christ, and enter the kingdom of Godโ to โInvite Jesus intoย yourย life.โ The great fallacy is that we do not invite Jesus into our lifeโHe is inviting us into His: His purpose, His work, and His kingdom!โ
โIn essence, the church bears witness to the in-breaking reign of God and serves as the instrument by which God is making โeverything sad come untrue.โ
There is an optimism that should naturally flow from the realization that โour God reignsโ (see Isaiah 52:7). Sadly, this optimism is, in my estimation, largely absent from the evangelical church in America. Many Christians seem to live and think as if Christ has been overcome by the world rather than vice versa (see John 16:33), or that the gates of Hell do indeed prevail against the church. Perhaps by recovering the biblical mission of the church as participation in Godโs unrelenting reign, we can, once again, be a people who live as more than those who seem to be barely surviving!โ[1]
If Craven is right, and I think he is, there is a present, urgent, even dire need to recover and teach the Gospel of the Kingdom. So, teaching the Kingdom must be the context, the umbrella, the environment in which Greenhouses form and grow. In fact, these communities need to be saturated in the Gospel of the Kingdom. Proper discipleship canโt happen without it.
Given that so many churches, Bible studies, community groups, and friendships fail to understand or teach the Kingdom, we can see why immersing ourselves in its teaching is so essential.
As weโve discussed here, the downstream impacts of the Forgotten Kingdom are harmful and damaging to both the church and culture.
Without the Kingdom, Christians assume fragmented, disintegrated lives. We tend to retreat from six of the seven cultural mountains rather than engage and influence them for our King.ย We buy the lie that anything โsecularโ actually exists.ย And Christian fatalism has become a dominant unconscious idea in the West, which further drives Christians from loving their neighbor well.ย Lack of community, event-driven Christianity, the rise of increasingly large and impersonal Christian institutions, and a consolidation of authority and power โ all of these can be traced back to reducing and forgetting the Kingdom.
And as Kyle and I talked about last episode, we have less and less incentive to become like Jesus if Craven is right, that many Christians unconsciously assume the world is overcoming Jesus instead of the other way around.
We need to be like the Sons of Issachar and understand the times in which we live.ย The antidote to the Forgotten Kingdom is to recapture and teach the Kingdom tenaciously and repetitively.ย Thatโs why itโs a central tenet of Soil & Roots.
The Discipleship Dilemma
Onto the Discipleship Dilemma. Why is spiritual formation essential to a a Greenhouse?
The lack of genuine discipleship is driven by the Forgotten Kingdom, and it begins with a shallow, incomplete understanding of evangelism.ย Modern evangelism has become so reduced and small that we shouldnโt wonder why we donโt see a deeper desire and thirst for living holier lives as we become more like Jesus.
Over and over again, we are told by the televangelists that we simply need to pray a prayer and โaccept Jesus into our hearts,โ with some vague notion that weโre sinners in need of saving.
Recently, I was in a church that regularly preaches a reduced Gospel yet considers itself highly evangelistic.ย They regularly report on the number of people who have made a โcommitment to Jesus,โ even though it works the other way around.
Their Gospel presentation didnโt mention repentance, which is a hallmark of following Jesus, hating our sin, and fleeing from it.ย That the Christian should be characterized by an increasing love for God, others, and creation and an increasingly holy life.
Modern evangelism often reduces the Gospel to a sales pitch, but a pitch that doesnโt even include the proper terms of the exchange.
Proclamation or Initiation?
William Abraham wrote a book called The Logic of Evangelism, in which he patiently evaluates modern evangelism, concluding that the New Testament church probably wouldnโt recognize the common โdrive-by evangelismโ of today, where a reduced version of the Gospel is often proclaimed at a mega church or a large event by a preacher we never meet.
โโฆcontinuing to define evangelism as proclamation alone involves a radical transformation of the practice of evangelism, lifting it out of its original setting and landing it in the middle of the twentieth-century church as we know it in the WestโฆIn the early church one could be relatively sure that the verbal proclamation of the gospel would be intimately linked to the Christian community and to the other ministries of the church that are essential to the rebirth and growth of the new believer. For the early Christians it would have been unthinkable to have evangelism without community and community without evangelism.โ[2]
Abraham argues that evangelism is not just the proclamation of the Gospel (and he argues for the Gospel of the Kingdom); evangelism is the initiation into the Kingdom.
And that modern evangelism, which tends to claim it fulfills the Great Commission, canโt possibly be fulfilling the Great Commission, because the Great Commission inherently involves things like being baptized into a community, teaching, obedience, and committed relationships.
Bad Anthropology
Additionally, weโre up against bad ideas about anthropology: the idea that human beings are formed simply by receiving instruction and information.ย That if we just agree to the correct belief system or apologetics, weโre good to go.ย But the core of a human being is the heart, the spirit.ย And our hearts are not formed only through instruction.
Church leaders sometimes claim that โInformation + Application = Transformation.โ That if we just receive the right information and do what it says, weโll be transformed.
Human beings are not so easily formed. Information is necessaryโฆ the relationship is central.
This is why our stories are so important.ย Becoming like Jesus means we know Him personally and His story, and we dig into our own hearts to better understand our own stories.
So, a Greenhouse is characterized by an intentional effort to get to know Jesus and our own hearts, because theyโre interconnected.ย And when we do this in a committed group, we also learn the hearts of others.ย This is a true, formative community.
Five-element communities intentionally spend time exploring the hearts and stories of everyone in the room. Itโs part of the rhythm of the group.
We Donโt Have the Time
A Greenhouse is a group of 5-12 people who get together twice a week for 90 minutes each.
The first weekly gathering focuses on teaching and living the Kingdom. The second weekly gathering focuses on spiritual habits, story, and what we might call โsoul careโ โ simply sharing how our lives with God are going.
When I share that Soil and Roots recommends getting together twice a week, there may be mental objections.ย Many people sitting in churches may immediately express concern about the time commitment.
And itโs here that we find the conflict between the typical Western lifestyle and what genuine discipleship actually requires of us.
Many Christians sitting in pews wonโt commit to getting together with a small community once a week, much less twice a week.
To which we would simply reply, โThatโs okay. Let us know if you change your mind.โ
This gets to one of the central themes of the Discipleship Dilemma.ย We have virtually no expectation of being discipled, nor do we expect to put much time and effort into becoming one.
But what if your 7-year-old daughter shows real gymnastic talent and decides she wants to become an Olympic gymnast?ย Would you expect her to be in the gym at least twice a week for 90 minutes? Probably.ย Most serious gymnasts live at the gym.
How about a marriage?ย Thatโs a formative relationship.ย Would we expect a marriage to be healthy and thriving if a husband and wife agreed to meet twice a week for 90 minutes?ย Seems like we might need more time than that.
What if youโre an alcoholic who deeply desires to conquer your addiction? Would you make time for one AA meeting a week? How about two? How about 8?
Americans spend 2 hours and 31 minutes on social media every day.[3] On average, we spend over 4 hours a day watching television.[4]
You get the point.
Remember, time is almost never the heart issue. Time is one of our eight indicators โ itโs a result, not a cause. How we use time is an indicator of a deeper reality.
Anyone who desires anything makes the time to fulfill that desire.
So, forming and committing to a Greenhouse is not really about time โ itโs about desire. The reality is that anyone who desperately wants Jesus and wants to become more like Him will make the time if they resonate with the Three Primary Problems and long for this type of community. Remember, most of us have created types of immersive communities before: for our lovers, for our kids, for our education, for our careers.
Making Up for Lost Time
Also, weโre purposefully trying to recover a primary community that has largely been lost in modern times. In generations past, we spent far more time with our primary community because we lived with them, ate with them, worked with them, and worshipped with them.
Today, we have to work to create time together. In effect, we get together frequently to overcome the lonely, fragmented, disintegrated lifestyle thatโs become so common.
Iโm meeting with one local pastor who is testing the idea of getting small groups together just once a week for some discipleship. He confessed that the church is having difficulty getting people to commit to that.
That brings up an interesting thought. Perhaps weโll find more people longing for this type of community outside of church institutions than inside them.
If modern Christianity has so promoted the unconscious idea that attending a weekly service checks the discipleship box, it wouldnโt surprise me to find some indifference from people in institutional congregations and a greater willingness from the disenfranchised, the lonely, and those with lingering doubts that keep them from darkening the door of a church. Thatโll be interesting to follow.
So, to review, a Greenhouse is defined by three things specific to solving the Three Primary Problems:
1. Its saturated in the teaching of the Kingdom and how to live in it
2. Its focus is on becoming more like Jesus as we explore both His heart and ours
3. Itโs a five-element group. It intentionally embraces time, habit, community, intimacy, and instruction.
The Early Church as “Greenhouses”
A few episodes ago, we noted that the very first five-element community was Jesus, the twelve disciples, and the women who traveled with them and ministered alongside them.
Thereโs another early community worth exploring, one we should seek to emulate and that may distinguish Greenhouses from other types of Christian gatherings.
Itโs the very first community to form after the arrival of the Holy Spirit, and we find it beautifully described in Acts 2:42-47. Keep in mind, about 3,000 people had just entered the Kingdom, so this isnโt a particularly small gathering, though it appears they were meeting in small groups pretty quickly.
โThey were continually devoting themselves to the apostlesโ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone kept feeling a sense of awe; and many wonders and signs were taking place through the apostles. And all those who had believed were together and had all things in common; and they began selling their property and possessions and were sharing them with all, as anyone might have need.
Day by day continuing with one mind in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord was adding to their number day by day those who were being saved.โ[5]
You see all five elements powerfully portrayed here, as well as the sense of being saturated in relevant teaching and powerful spiritual formation.
First, we see a deep group commitment to God and to each other. Luke tells us the people were continually devoting themselves to four things: teaching, fellowship, eating together, and prayer. We find four key elements here: time, habit, community, and instruction in just this one passage.
Radical Generosity
Then we see a wonderful picture of something God has stressed to His people since ancient Israel.ย Godโs communities are to be characterized by radical generosity.
Five-element communities treat money differently from the world, and perhaps even from some church institutions.ย We donโt see a discussion here of a 10% tithe, whether thatโs on gross or net, budgets, tax-deductible giving, retirement planning, or financial security.ย Those may all be worthy topics, but what we see here is the community sacrificially taking care of each otherโs needs.
Acts 2 is not an advertisement for socialism, which is government-compelled wealth redistribution. This is radical generosity in response to radical generosity. God has so generously given to us, the early churchโs hearts responded in kind out of love and concern for neighbor. No legalism, no requirements, no boundaries. But plenty of sacrifice without concern for future security.
What might radical generosity look like today?
Though very few people could legitimately make the time for a five-element community if they desired it, one group that may truly not have the time is single moms.ย Imagine a mother of three kids, working two or three jobs just to pay rent and feed her children.ย She desires to become more like Jesus in a genuine, close community, but her time is legitimately locked up working and caring for her kids.
What if a Greenhouse regularly took up a collection and gave her enough money so that she could quit one of her jobs?ย What if they sold their property and possessions and shared them with her, so that she could be discipled in community?ย And what if they paid for babysitting during their gatherings so she didnโt have to worry about childcare?
Sincere
Then Luke shares another beautiful characteristic of these early communities โ โgladness and sincerity of heart.โ Here we see our fourth key element: intimacy and transparency.
The word โsincerityโ literally means โwithout cracks.โ One Bible dictionary defines it as the
โPersonal quality of living life from a pure motive without deceit. Associated with words or ideas like โtruthโ (1 Cor. 5:8), โgenuinenessโ (2 Cor. 8:8), โgodlinessโ (2 Cor. 1:12), and preaching the gospel sincerely (2 Cor. 2:17).[6]
So โsincerity of heartโ means their very core, their hearts, roots, spirits, were genuine, open, truthful.
Taken together, Acts 2:42-27 is really a striking passage of Scripture. And it beautifully sums up what should characterize a five-element community.
So, letโs put this all together. Is what weโre describing as a modern-day five-element community the same thing as corporate worship, a Bible study, a family gathering, or a community group? ย It could be, but probably not.
A Greenhouse exists to solve the Three Primary Problems.
1. Its saturated in the teaching of the Kingdom and how to live in it
2. Its focus is on becoming more like Jesus as we explore both His heart and ours
3. Itโs a five-element community; it intentionally embraces time, habit, physical gathering, intimacy, and instruction.
And it may also be characterized by a radical, if not nonsensical, generosity of time, money, resources, and practical help.
The Class Meeting
We might be tempted to look at Acts 2 and claim that that community was unique in church history. After all, the Holy Spirit had just arrived, the Kingdom had just been incepted, and Luke is powerfully portraying the birth of a new reality.
After Stephenโs martyrdom, a few chapters later, most of these communities fled into other areas, and itโs painfully evident from Paulโs letters that not every community got off to a great start.
But a pastor friend of mine and I were chatting about spiritual formation, and he suggested I read a book called The Class Meeting.
The author, Kevin Watson, has assessed the small-group movement in the West today and concluded that there are three types of small groups: the fellowship group, the informational group, and the transformational group.ย Fellowship groups get together to hang out, informational groups get together to study curricula, and transformational groups get together to be formed.[7]
Watson believes the majority of small groups today are informational, and as you might suspect, I agree.
The first part of his book traces the origins of transformational small groups in the early Methodist Church, about 200 years ago.ย These groups were called โClass Meetings.โ
These groups were simple: โClasses were intended to have between seven and twelve members in them. Women and men often, though not always, met together in the same class. The groups were also led by both women and men. Classes were divided primarily by geographical location. In other words, you would have attended a class meeting with the Methodists in your neighborhood.โ[8]
And the format was simple.
Prayer, a few hymns and songs, and then a simple question, โHow is it with your soul?โ A modern version of the question might be, โHow is your life with God?โ[9]
During this weekly meeting, there was no Bible study, no curriculum, no homework.
Watson writes, โThe phrase that best captures what the Methodists believed was so important about the class meeting was โwatching over one another in love.โ Early Methodists were asked to invite others into their lives and to be willing to enter deeply into the lives of other people so that together they would grow in grace. They were committed to the idea that the Christian life is a journey of growth in grace, or sanctification. And they believed that they needed one another in order to persevere on this journey.โ[10]
John Wesley believed the mid-week Class Meeting was essential to Methodism and the growth of the church universal.
It certainly seemed essential.ย โIn 1776, Methodists accounted for 2.5 percent of religious adherents in the colonies, the second smallest of the major denominations at the time. By 1850, Methodists comprised 34.2 percent of religious adherents in the U.S., 14 percent more than the next-largest group…And through the period of this growth, every Methodist was expected to participate in a weekly class meeting.โ[11]
Watson noted that, despite John Wesleyโs insistence that the class meeting be preserved, they eventually died out due to two primary factors: the growing prosperity of Methodists and the rise of Sunday school.
Both of those may be topics for another time, but Watson is, right now, working to rekindle the class meeting in his denomination.
As we provide some definitions about ICFs to you by the end of this season, youโll see some elements of the class meeting in what weโre suggesting. The class meeting doesnโt solve all of the Three Primary Problems, but it speaks to the Discipleship Dilemma and the human need for a primary, committed community. And I think Watson proves that close, committed, primary communities are not just something from the book of Acts.
Revival through Community?
Like you, I often hear prayers and petitions for revival in the West.ย We pray that the Holy Spirit comes and renews our hearts and our culture.ย We tend to assume this revival will happen through some explosion of the modern idea of evangelism or extended spiritual experiences, as weโve seen on some college campuses. Perhaps.
Though perhaps we might look at revival a bit differently. If William Abraham is correct, in that evangelism is more than the proclamation of a reduced version of the Gospel, and Kevin Watson is correct, in that Christianity has grown rapidly in the past through small groups โlooking over one another in love,โ we might consider their perspectives.
What if we formed small communities that practiced โinitiating people into the Kingdom,โ versus just reciting a prayer and intellectually agreeing to some assertions?ย What if we formed small, five-element communities that focused on spiritual formation by โlooking over one another in love?โ
What if revival happens through committed Christians living the Kingdom life, in small primary communities, practicing radical generosity while journeying with others to become more like Jesus?
[1] https://www.breakpoint.org/2019-01-recovering-the-gospel-of-the-kingdom/
[2] Abraham, W. (1989). The Logic of Evangelism (pp. 56-57). Wm. B. Eerdman Publishing Co.
[3] https://techjury.net/blog/time-spent-on-social-media/#gref
[4] http://www.csun.edu/science/health/docs/tv&health.html#:~:text=violence%20on%20TV-,Television%20Statistics,years%20glued%20to%20the%20tube.
[5] New American Standard Bible: 1995 update (Ac 2:42โ47). (1995). The Lockman Foundation.
[6] Sincerity. (2003). In C. Brand, C. Draper, A. England, S. Bond, E. R. Clendenen, & T. C. Butler (Eds.), Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary (p. 1509). Holman Bible Publishers.
[7] Watson, K. (2014). The Class Meeting: Reclaiming a Forgotten (and Essential) Small Group Experience (p 5). Seedbed Publishing.
[8] Watson, K. (2014). The Class Meeting (p 25). Seedbed Publishing.
[9] Watson, K. (2014). The Class Meeting (p 25). Seedbed Publishing.
[10] Watson, K. (2014). The Class Meeting (p 26). Seedbed Publishing.
[11] Watson, K. (2014). The Class Meeting (p 22). Seedbed Publishing.
