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A friend who is under thirty-five told me this story of a major transition that happened in his life and ministry:

When God began to nudge my wife and me toward starting a church, I began looking for someone who was "doing church right." I had grown up in churches that pushed me to participate in worship and ministry but in which very few people actually met Jesus and became a part of those communities.

My search led me to attend a conference at a well-known teaching church. I was so inspired about reaching lost people that I remember crying with joy intermittently through many of the talks. My wife and I set out to plant a church just like the one I had visited. At conference time the next year, I brought all our key people from the new congregation we were launching in Clemson, South Carolina. We each left the conference ready to build that church in our state.

It took us about six months to realize that something was seriously wrong.

It wasn't working, our generation wasn't responding, and I felt like quitting. It was as if we were putting on a big performance that left people unaffected.

Fortunately, God is faithful and taught us in our discouragement. He used the teaching church to free me to be creative and think outside the box and inside the Spirit's leading. God took that freedom and many of the things I had been taught growing up about a more participative church and blended them into something that appealed to and changed Clemson students. We made a bunch of changes all at once, and lives began to turn toward Jesus. We moved from a school auditorium to a bar, from morning gatherings to night gatherings, and from lousy music to a solid worship band.

More important, what really changed us and the course of the church was our move to make high-engagement worship central to everything we did. We became worshipers and a real family. We began to build a faith community that experienced worship, a sense of family, and personal growth. The church expanded rapidly toward God and numerically over the next three years.

—John Reeves

UnLearning Church is about people like John. I hope it is also about people like you.

The following pages address the unique qualities of your church, your community, your leadership, and your life. This book is about leaders in churches, old and young, daring to leave the status quo and fearlessly stepping out into God's promising and yet unknown future. It's about "unLearners" on the cutting edge of how God works best—through unique personalities localized to their context. It's about the prophetic witness to Christ's presence in individual communities with a ripple effect reaching around the world.

No longer can any one community of Christ's followers dictate what another church must do to succeed. I'm "unLearning" the model of cloning someone else's blueprint. That era is over. God's kingdom is not best represented by franchises of McChurch. If you focus your energies on copying someone else's methodologies or programs, you will miss something crucially important.

The Holy Spirit is empowering transformational leaders who demonstrate the kingdom of God in unique ways in each different community. That's a world of difference from copying someone else's ministry and building a "been there, done that, bought the T-shirt" look-alike.

Every church leader has a specific call and distinguishing gift base of talent. You already have the God-given gifts you need. Your mission is to use them to excel in a local implementation of the overall mission of Jesus Christ. Your effectiveness in the future will be measured by how well your church demonstrated the kingdom of God in unique ways to your indigenous community and beyond. Your goal is to connect people to an authentic experience of God in this world.

An Ancient-Future Answer

Today's emerging churches are anchoring themselves in the ancient truths of biblical authority, yet they're operating in an atmosphere of innovation and change. Armed with a strong sense of "first causes," they're forming distinctive communities of faith. They are safe spaces for spiritually hungry hearts, environments of deep connection, experiences of community, and centers of involvement in the pursuit of social justice.

The surrounding culture has significantly changed in recent years. This book is an urgent call for spiritual and prophetic leadership toward the new developments in our culture. The question is not "What is Ginghamsburg (or Pick-Your-Favorite Church) doing these days?" Nor is the motivation to climb the American ladder named bigger-better-more.

The call is to unLearn—to break the rules of conventional wisdom in order to translate God's ancient purposes to today's postmodern world. The challenge is to translate and target those purposes to each indigenous environment. This book is about visualizing and articulating alternative pathways of ministry based on who you are and how God has uniquely gifted you. It addresses the fulfillment of your life mission as a church leader, your specific commitment to spiritual growth, and your ministry focus for the next year.

This book is organized into two parts:

Part 1 shows how unLearning CHURCHES connect people with a high-touch experience of God in a high-tech world. These chapters will help you formulate a vision of what God wants to do through your church.

Part 2 shows how unLearning LEADERSHIP empowers servants of God to do the mission of Jesus. These chapters will guide you in making God's vision a reality in your own unique context, with the group of people God has called together for this purpose.

You can create environments in which people can become radical followers of Jesus Christ. As God asked the prophet Jeremiah, to whom he'd given great vision, "What do you see?" each chapter challenges you to describe the vision God is creating in you.

What old habits and worldviews must you unLearn in order to make that vision a reality? What does the next step look like?

Radical Abandonment and Evangelism

UnLearning is not about continuing what you are already doing and simply slapping on a new slogan, better technology, or some other additive. The goal of this book is not to showcase the latest program or to give you a numbered list of how-to steps. The challenge in these pages is to hear and obey God with a sense of radical abandonment. The result will be new ways of ministering to people, using the resources God has already given to you.

Radical abandonment to Jesus is much more holistic than a set of prescriptive formulas. Jesus rose from the grave, looked at his disciples, and said, "You will receive power" (Acts 1:8). A revolutionary power. An uncommon power. Power to be witnesses in the power of the Holy Spirit.

The challenge is to find and follow God's directive for you. Your local implementation may take on a one-of-a-kind flavor seen nowhere else. Yet the results will be similar: You'll design communities invaded by the presence of God through Jesus Christ that demonstrate the very kingdom of God. Radical Christianity is being the hands and feet of Jesus Christ, led and empowered by the Holy Spirit, ready to serve and give witness whenever and to whomever God calls us to reach, in ways uniquely appropriate for each particular community. Consider these two examples:

Everything about Princeton Alliance Church at the Crossroads says, "Urban professionals are welcome here." The church campus in New Jersey's research corridor was intentionally constructed to look like the executive office parks nearby. Each church ministry models a quality standard consistent with the surrounding business community. Not surprisingly, the church has made great inroads for Christ with executives and managers at nearby Merrill Lynch, Bloomberg, and Bristol-Myers Squibb. "Our calling is to reach everyone we can," says pastor Bob Cushman, "but we know we're best at connecting with urban professionals, so that's why we build a corporate feel into all we do."

9 Six hundred miles to the southwest, Quest Community Church in Lexington, Kentucky, has a similar passion for outreach but does best at impacting a different community. Pastor Pete Hise is proud of the fact that 25 percent of the people who attend Sunday mornings are either atheists or agnostics. He's particularly glad that young people with body piercings find lots of others at the church who look like them. "Which church in Lexington will reach that kind of person for Jesus?" he asks. "The one gaping hole in most churches' ministry is in reaching the Generation X crowd. That's what we do best." He estimates that as many as three hundred thousand people in greater Lexington need to hear about Jesus in a way they have not yet heard.

These two churches share the same overall mission of turning irreligious people into committed followers of Christ, but the local expressions are completely different. Each is appropriate for some segment of its community. Each of these churches has found its own flavor.

It's time to go beyond knowing and believing God's truth to experiencing and demonstrating God's presence. God wants you to be authentic, the real deal, becoming a change agent for the entire world.

Start by UnLearning

To become an indigenous, relevant community, you will un-Learn lots of things you thought were right.

UnLearning is about going a different direction. UnLearning means repentance. It requires us to identify ways we were wrong and to rebuild in a new direction. UnLearning is about breaking away from the pack, because a crowd will always be slower to respond to the radical voice of Jesus Christ. UnLearning is about ways the Holy Spirit can adjust your leadership skills and attitudes. Then you, in turn, can lead the way for a similar transformation in others. Most important, unLearning is about experience.

Leaders who unLearn are a different breed from what you may be used to. They are willing to fail. They break their own rules— at least the rules that prohibit people from becoming passionate followers of Jesus. UnLearning churches demonstrate an uncompromising approach to church mission and ministry. The methods may seem new, but the approach follows an ancient call.

Why a book about unLearning? Any navigator who travels fluid waters knows the need to change the angle of a boat's sails as soon as the wind blows from a new direction. Today's ocean of constantly changing pop-culture breezes may make you uncomfortable. That's a good thing. Discomfort precedes change. Tension spurs learning and growth. It's important for you to ask questions that other leaders may not be asking. Now is the time to seriously evaluate what you're doing in light of the fresh wind of God's Spirit blowing through a post-Christian world.

UnLearning Church will inspire you to create a safe space, an environment in which people are free to become radical followers of Jesus Christ. This book will challenge how you see and do church. It will speak to both head and heart, and chances are you'll find yourself on an unexpected spiritual journey.

Are you ready to take yourself and your church on that kind of journey? Ready to unLearn anything in your church, leadership, or lifestyle that stands in the way? God is calling people to develop faith communities that effectively reach unchurched populations for Jesus Christ in a postmodern, post-Christian world—radical disciples abandoned to the purpose of evangelism through relevant service.

Want to be there? Then let's begin unLearning.