What Church Reset Got Wrong

What I've Learned Since

In early 2020 I released my second book, Church Reset: God’s Design for So Much More.

It’s never going to make a NYT Bestseller list, but if you know my work there’s a good chance it’s because of that book which gave this site its name.

Coincidentally, it’s on sale for 25% off at Focus Press this week and also available at full price but with free shipping on Amazon.

As a brief summary for those who are not familiar, my contention in the book is that in our day we have turned the church into a business when God intended for it to be a family.

Many churches aren’t built on “what every joint supplies” (Ephesians 4) but on the talents of a few producers who put on “church” for everybody else—the consumers.

The solution proposed is to turn the spotlight back to Jesus rather than the numerous other things we’ve focused on, and we do that by making each member into a disciple rather than a consumer.

I still stand behind most of the ideas in the book, mainly because I truly believe they’re God’s ideas and not mine. I believe this because I’ve had countless Christians tell me their own, independent studies were reaching the same conclusions mine did and they were happy to see a book that captured the ideas they were finding in the Scriptures. So the glory goes to God, not me.

Having said that, there are some things I would change.

And, as I embark on the project of putting my follow-up book on paper in the coming months, here are three course corrections I’m making.

I was a little too dismissive of leadership.

I’m not saying I was entirely against leadership, but I did flatten the church’s hierarchy to a degree in an overcorrection against the consumer-producer split.

“There’s a sense of ‘we are here to help you.’ But who is the we? And who is the you? Don’t the you have a responsibility to the we? And is it Biblical to have that split? Such a distinction is not Biblical in any sense whatsoever.”

I still believe the consumer-producer setup is wrong, but I’m less critical of the clergy-laity split. Ephesians 4:11 clearly says He gave some as apostles, prophets, etc. James 3:1 says that not many should become teachers because of the stricter judgment he role brings. 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 set lofty qualifications for elders, setting them apart as an elite class, as I’ve written on this site.

Flattening this hierarchy is prohibitive to the kind of works I laid out in the book. There will always be a need for decision makers who influence how a given church will operate. We shouldn’t glorify a man and make church about following him, but neither should we withhold honor from those who do give care for our souls.

Closely related is this realization:

Not everybody is called to be a disciple-maker.

“Jesus wanted His disciples to go, baptize, and teach until their students could go, baptize, and teach and participate in the mission of the church themselves. Jesus followers develop Jesus followers who develop Jesus followers. That’s where true discipleship leads us.”

The Great Commission was given to the apostles, and I still maintain it depicts a -go-baptize-teach-go-baptize-teach cycle which Jesus started and still continues to this day. But that doesn’t mean everybody the apostles reached was also under the command.

Real life experience made it clear to me that this isn’t something everyone can or even should do. There were a few members I’ve worked with who obviously were equipped to take on such a role, and there were others who simply were not.

That is not a slight against them. They still have a role to play, but it will not be in the realm of teaching others, whether publicly or privately. They can still evangelize, be examples, and serve, but disciple-making will not be their role.

But, because I misunderstood this point, it led to a shortcoming in application.

I misunderstood the intended end of disciple-making.

“What we should aim to see is Christians doing the work of the one anothers and evangelism organically, as a natural part of their lives, rather than as a scheduled event someone else put on for them.”

The intended culmination of disciple-making as I described in the book was a life of ministry that mirrored Christ’s. Make more disciples and carry out the one anothers, in short. Which is good. But ministry is not everything.

Becoming Christ-like does not just mean ministering how He ministered. Instead we are to see everything in our lives the way He would. Even the boring, normal stuff.

This misunderstanding is a residual of the Francis Chan/David Platt moment, in which much of their very popular writing and speaking had many of us convinced that ministry is almost the sole end of the Christian life.

Because of their work, many Christians were convinced they needed to radically alter their lives about ministry. Some good things came about, but a lot of overcorrecting happened, too.

But what about raising a family and providing for them? What about improving your community - and not just as bait for evangelism? What about all that non-ministry stuff?

Much of their work fell into what I’ve coined as “Stuck in the first century” syndrome, in which we attempt to operate in the world the way the fledgling church (and especially the apostles) did.

But their setting and ours are not the same. We are stewards of 2,000 years of the church’s growth. We are not an upstart church facing heavy persecution. In our setting, the large majority of Christians are not called to live as the apostles, sell our things, and be separated from our families.

Rather, we’re called to live out counter-cultural faithfulness in what some might see as mundane, ordinary lives. And that’s perfectly fine.

When we recapture this focus we can drill down into answering the questions of real life. Even in the New Testament we see this progression. “Ok, we got all these people baptized. Now what do we do about modesty, meats sacrificed to idols, holidays”—you know, the everyday concerns of Christians living in a culture.

We should have the same progression—“Ok, you’ve been baptized. Now let’s talk about how a disciple operates within the home, the workplace, the polis, etc.”

Disciple-making has to lead to such practical, everyman kind of application or we’ve made two errors:

We’ve compartmentalized Christianity and ministry away from the rest of life, and we’ve cost ourselves the kind of culture that’s created when Christians live together under Christ’s Lordship.

In my next book (and the already-planned follow-ups), it is these things that will be in the spotlight.

While I still think the book holds up well and its primary critique of the business church model is undeniably true, I do think these slight course corrections can lead to a better, more Biblical understanding of the church.