Navigating the New Normal:Thoughts on Life After College

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I was thinking a couple days ago about the first quarter I started teaching regularly here at CL. The freshman girls that year had formed a special bond. As I was just kind of learning how to do this, giving my first, uneven messages, they all sat together every week, right across the front…and they all dressed alike…and wore their hair in identical side ponytails…and frankly, I found them mildly terrifying. And for the first few months there was only one freshman guy, a seemingly quiet, introverted boy who sat all the way in the back. Well, those women are graduating in a couple weeks…and so is Kiho. And they don’t wear side ponys any more (at least Kiho doesn’t)…and I’ve come to call many of them friends…my life, the life of my family, this ministry and this campus have all been substantially enriched by their years here. And that little core group has been joined over the years by a number of fine men and women who will also graduate this year and have also had remarkable runs. And we are genuinely thrilled for you. Graduation is a really fun, exciting time and you totally deserve to celebrate and be celebrated.


But graduation has always reminded me of friend who once told me about his last day in the Army. He and a handful of other guys who were also done that day went to a one hour seminar on how to integrate back into the civilian world…and then they simply weren’t in the army any more. Reflecting on that day, he looked at me in disbelief and said, ‘It takes 6 months to join the army and only 1 hour to unjoin.’ After 4 years of a rigorous but counter cultural lifestyle, they were going to face a new-normal, and the army thought that the least they could do is provide them an one-hour of thoughts on that process.

I have often thought about how finishing up college is a similar shocking experience of plunging into a new normal…except without the one hour exit seminar. You don’t even get an exit seminar. And that’s not ok. Now, we are way too late in the quarter for me to stand up here and talk for an hour…So I’m going to give you 25 minutes. These are a few of thoughts that I have compiled over last few years of watching people make the transition well and poorly and from over a dozen substantial responses I got from a request I sent out to last year’s seniors. As usual, I have a lot of thoughts and quotes from last year’s class that I couldn’t squeeze into the talk. So I have put them online.

You see, there are two big transitions in our culture where the church is just getting killed. The first and toughest, you have made it through. The transition from high school to college is strewn with carnage of faith. It is like the banks of Normandy…many just don’t make it...they walk away from Jesus for good. This is why Amanda and I do what we do. That’s why we have joined the effort on this front.

But the second big transition is more subtle. It is the transition from college to church. And here the losses are not to unbelief…but to ineffectiveness. Fewer people take themselves out of the faith, but many take themselves out of the game. So there are three big ideas I’d like to offer you about how to Navigate the New Normal. First…

I. Learn to Work with God

Many (maybe most) of my friends who were serious about their faith in college went into full time (usually support raising) ministry. There was a perception that only second class, materialistic Christians get ‘secular’ jobs. And while that is great, I soon realized that I had not been given any theological resources for how to do anything else without feeling like a spiritual failure. I had no theology of work.

Usually, if you hear work talked about in church it is an exhortation to not work too much. I have heard the value of work generally pitched in three ways in Christian circles (in order of increasing compellingness):

1. People Like to Eat: The verse you hear get kicked around is the one where Paul says: ‘Anyone who doesn’t provide for his family is worse than an unbeliever’ – So man up and go to work. It is an unfortunate consequence of the fall so push thorough it. It sucks, but the world is fallen and you need to keep your family in Top Ramen.

2. Pastors Like to Eat: You see, by working hard, you produce excess resources that you can use to fund full time ministers who can devote their energies full time to the work of the gospel (the real work). You have the responsibility and privilege to become silent partners in their ministry by getting out of bed and going to the cube farm year after year.

3. You are a Missionary: Full time Christian workers lose most of their connections outside of the Christian community pretty quickly. They have the training but no access. This is actually the primary frustration of most of my friends who are in full time ministry…they got into it to introduce people to Jesus, but their circle shifts so that they know very few people who don’t already know him. By getting a secular job you are a ‘secret agent,’ you ‘infiltrate’ the secular world, you have the access. Your work is a platform for ministry. By working with integrity and looking for opportunities for the gospel to take root, work provides you with spiritual opportunities.

Now, there is an element of truth to each of these, but they are all fundamentally flawed. Even together, they paint a fundamentally impoverished picture. That honestly sounds like a pretty terrible way to spend your life. These motivations are not going to do it. Just a couple weeks ago, I had a student ask me ‘how do you do it? How do you go to work?” You are going to have to find meaning in those 50 to 60 hours per week or it is going to diminish you. You need a theology of work.

Remember, Adam and Eve they had jobs in paradise and I believe we will have jobs after the resurrection. Our culture has adopted the Roman and Greek view of work: Leisure is good and work is bad. But the Hebrew, view of work could not be more different.

As I said earlier this year: Work is a pre-fall ordinance. It was part of God’s good creation BEFORE the fall. Work is normative…full time ministry is the exception. We were made to work. We were made to join God in bringing order out of chaos. To join God in his initiative of making things and caring for the people and earth he made. God made work, the fall made it hard. But good, useful, diligent work is part of God’s intent for human flourishing. So you have to learn to make your work into worship. What is it about aerospace engineering that brings order out of chaos? What is it about occupational therapy that rolls back the effects of the fall? What is it about working in a coffee shop while you look for something in your field that declares the coming kingdom?

You have to learn to work with God.

II. Become the Church

You’ve got to get in a church. The local church is the basic functional unit of Christian life and practice is the ‘missional community.’ Whether or not you flourish in this transition really depends on how soon and well you integrate into a missional community. As I mentioned, last year’s seniors had lots to say about this transition, and I am going to quote them throughout this talk, starting with Monica, who said:

“Find a church and get involved ASAP.”

Christianity simply cannot be done alone. It wasn’t deigned to be done alone. But getting in on the community and the mission is harder in the next phase. It is harder for a couple reasons. First, because there are a lot of weird churches out there:

Joey and Laura ‘Welcome the Birds’ video

You have to find a church that is serious about the Scriptures and the big ideas that have been important to the Church always and everywhere. And you have to find a church that translates these into action. Finding a church that believes true things, (that majors on the majors) and puts them into action is non-negotiable. But too many wander for too long looking for a sort of ‘College Life for grown ups…” Here’s what Natalia said about this process:

“It took me soooo long to find a church because I was being (obnoxiously?) picky. Don't get me wrong, I think it's important to find a church where you're being challenged, however, I had a bad habit of writing off most churches I went to because it was "too this" or "too that"... and then realized that the church is made up of imperfect human beings and I was looking for perfection.”

But once you find a good church, your job is not done. The harder part is to become part of that church. And that is surprisingly difficult. You see most local churches are pitched to the leading/giving generation…the forty and fifty something crowd. Here is the sad truth. Churches are run by middle age people with money to give, children to care for and limited energy for innovation. A 22 year old does not fit their paradigm…shoot, a 28 year old hardly fits that paradigm. So most churches are ignoring our most energetic and creative people leaving them on the sidelines until they make some money and make some babies and fit the paradigm.

The question is, do you have the discipleship level to make community and mission happen anyway? You have got to find a way to get in on 1) Community and 2) Mission. And so let me take those in turn.

1) Community: Finding and maintaining community will take more intentional effort on your part outside of the college environment. This frustrates a lot of people. But the #1 piece of advice from last year’s seniors was that you have GOT to make community happen…because dominant theme that emerged when people talked about their struggles transitioning to life after college was loneliness.

“…feeling lonely and wishing you were still in college…”
“… season of loneliness …”
“…extended loneliness…”
“…it seemed like I was wandering into the future alone, defenseless…”
“…I began to feel lonely “
“...In the loneliness…Sometimes if feels like you've fallen off the face of the earth…”

“…every single person in our class (yes, even the ones who are engaged and married!) has talked of feeling lonely post-college. I mean, even if you stay, everyone else leaves…I don’t think I have ever been as lonely or felt as much like a failure as I did in the 6 months immediately following senior year. ”

And this was my experience, and the experience of my friends when we graduated almost 15 years ago. Now, most of those quotes were followed with thoughts about how loneness was an opportunity of a new kind of spiritual growth…and it is, I also experienced that, but that is a special temporary sort of grace…God’s normative environment for our flourishing is community…

Now, this is kind of a downer. Why would I tell you this? 2 Reasons

1) It helps to know you are not weird when it happens…and…

2) To press upon you that you have GOT to make community happen

Listen, one of the reasons I am a Christian, is because Jesus seems to get me. He seems to understand what human beings need in a deep and insightful way. And one of those things is other people.

New York Times columnist David Brooks was surveying some recent psychological research in a column a few months ago and marshaled an impressive amount of evidence that significant relationships with ‘other people’ (of the non-digital variety) is the most important factor in human flourishing.

“According to one study, (he says) joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income.” – David Brooks – New York Times

But here is the thing, until now, there has been a generational ministry set aside for you in the church…a structural mechanism in the church for grouping the other people like you together for natural community. Community was there, you just had to find it. That ends now. In college, we have urged you again and again…”Find Community.” But in the next life stage, community isn’t found. It’s forged.

Now as it turns out, I never had to learn to be very good at that…because I married someone who was amazing at it. We lived in 3 cities (slide - map) in the first 5 years after college…and we developed close friends in each place (not as close or ubiquitous as our college friends, but close enough for us to smile nostalgically every time we think of them – slide - pics). How did she do it…she was constantly inviting. Constantly taking risks of rejection. Constantly asking people to do stuff together. And here is the crazy thing. My wife is an introvert. She loves being alone. But she knows she needs people even if she doesn’t feel like being with people.

So she was constantly cooking meals, inviting friends to concerts, running around after church and inviting all of the people anywhere close to our life stage to lunch EVERY SUNDAY, creating every opportunity she could manufacture for connection. Because after college, community isn’t found, it’s forged.

But here’s the other thing about friendship. The very deepest friendships that we have had since college have not simply emerged from our desire to have friends…they have developed from sharing a common passionate purpose. Community emerges from mission. Which leads me to the second part of getting into the Church which is harder after college than it was in college:

2) Mission: You will probably have to start ‘at the bottom’ in ministry. When I was in undergrad I was the student leader of our campus ministry (that was roughly half the size of College Life). Junior year our campus pastor had a brain aneurism and the para-church staff worker was pulled from campus because he couldn’t raise enough support. When I came on as the student leader my Junior year, we suddenly went from 2 adult leaders, to zero. So for a year and a half I essentially ran a Christian ministry of over 100 students. But Amanda had the really distinguished college ministry. Amanda led small groups every single semester after her freshman year, most of them for spiritually curious students with no spiritual background and she walked with nearly a dozen people as they found faith in Jesus during her time in college. Then we graduated, got married, joined the church and looked for a ministry. We went to the leaders and asked them to put us to work. They looked at us, their eyes lit up, and they said, “You know what we really need, we need bodies to staff the nursery for the early service. We can’t seem find people willing to get up that early.”

This is not uncommon. Because of the insane pace and turnover in campus ministry, it provides students great opportunities to do REALLY significant ministry and many of you have developed fantastic ministry skill sets. Some of you have led small groups, developed kingdom projects, imagined exciting new initiatives, some of you have preached, others have led worship or…I mean, Tony, Alex, Deiter, Lenna and Kiki have made these events happen every week (and these events that are bigger and take more planning than 80% of American church services). But these skills and gifts are generally not recognized quickly by the local Church. They often look at you and see your age. So Amanda and I had a choice. We could do what needed to be done, or we could take our ball and go home.

So we staffed the nursery, and before long we ran the nursery, and after a couple years we were asked to lead a small group, and after a couple of years we were asked to run a ghetto youth ministry, and a full decade and a theology degree later we were asked to serve on an elder board and I started teaching sporadically in different ministries…and finally, a dozen years after college, Dan Seitz took a risk on us, and finally here we are in a great ministry, doing the kind of thing I pictured us doing right out of college. But it started with earning trust by playing blocks with Evan, a 3 year old who used to come to church so sleepy, dazed and confused, he was still holding his cold buttered toast…and would just stand there holding that toast watching me build block towers until he finally pulled it together enough to actually take a bite of the toast like 20 minutes later. But some of my college friends were offended by ‘starting over’ in ministry…and they never started. Most of them were taken out of the game.

The local church requires patience and humility…but I really believe that with all its flaws, it is God’s primary vehicle for his kingdom. So find a good local church (actually, forget that, it doesn’t exist, find a tolerable church and learn to love them), stay at it, and prove your value to them by doing whatever they need done as well as you can.

If you wait for the church to discover how productive, innovative and creative you can be…you will wait a long time. They will inadvertently waste your 20’s, unless you refuse to let them…so refuse to let them.

So you are going to have to forge a community AND a ministry (while lovingly submitting to, learning from and esteeming the leadership of that church). The sooner you stop seeing the old people in the church as your adversaries and start embracing them as mentors…the sooner they will embrace your contributions…Because you need the perspective and vision of the older generations But they need your energy and innovation. Win them to that understanding by your humility and eagerness. Finally…

III. Build or Venture

I remember one morning my senior year. I was walking to a final deeply sleep deprived (which, unfortunately, described most mornings of my undergraduate experience). And as I was trudging up the steep hill our little campus was built on I thought of all the people who told me to enjoy college because they would be the best days of my life. And I remember thinking “Shoot, I hope they are wrong.” And you know what, they were. Once we made it through those rough first couple of years transitioning to the church, ministry and marriage…our 20’s were better than our college years…and the ministry and family years of our 30’s have been better still.

I actually feel really bad for the people who told me that college would be the best days of my life. It means they got stuck. They failed to embrace and enjoy the blessings and challenges of each life stage for what they are…they just processed them through the lens of ‘less freedom’ ‘fewer friends’ ‘more hours in a cubicle’ ‘more poo on my shirt’ (which happens when you have kids, or before that if you are an agg major).

If college turns out to be the best days of your life…your life sucks. You need to get a life. But the transition between life stages whether it is HS-College, or College-after college or to suddenly becoming responsible for tiny human beings, it shakes you up and asks you what you’re really made of.

You don’t have to know where you are going to make ground. Who you become is a function of what you try. You won’t know where you are headed until you try a path.

“Be content with your season of life and maximize your time in it.”-Monica

And your post-college twenties are your chance to either set up future decades to be reliable foundational members of your community and church or to take on risky ventures that won’t be available later on. So don’t waste them. Whatever you choose to do, make sure you move forward. It doesn’t have to move you towards a particular goal, but this is either a time to build or it’s a time to venture. You either need to be building for the long term (save for a house even if you don’t have a girlfriend, get the hard degree you will need so you don’t have to go back when you have kids, build a career you love, get the theological development and skills you need for lifetime of fruitful lay ministry), or it’s a time for venturing (get in on a church plant, join a mission initiative, start a business)…venture on a risky, exciting initiative that could fail, but it’s ok if it does, because no one is counting on you to eat. But do something. It is a time to build or to venture. Which of those you choose has a lot to do with your personality and your gifting. But floating is not an option.

I don’t do long quotes often, but Shauna Niequist, an author from Chicago, put this pretty well:

This is the thing: When you hit 28 or 30, everything begins to divide. You can see very clearly two kinds of people. On one side, people who have used their 20s to learn and grow, to find God and themselves and their dreams, people who know what works and what doesn’t, who have pushed through to become real live adults. Then there’s the other kind, who are hanging onto college…with all their might. They’ve stayed in jobs they hate, because they’re too scared to get another one. They’ve stayed with men or women who are good but not great, because they don’t want to be lonely. They mean to find a church, they mean to develop intimate friendships…But they don’t do those things, so they live in an extended adolescence, no closer to adulthood than when they graduated.
 Don’t be like that. Don’t get stuck. Move, travel, take a class, take a risk. There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming. Don’t lose yourself at happy hour, but don’t lose yourself on the corporate ladder either. Stop every once in a while…with your journal.

Ask yourself some good questions like: “Am I proud of the life I’m living? What have I tried this month? What have I learned about God this year?...Do the people I’m spending time with give me life, or make me feel small? Is there any brokenness in my life that’s keeping me from moving forward?”


Now is your time. Walk closely with people you love, and with people who believe God is good and life is a grand adventure. Don’t get stuck in the past, and don’t try to fast-forward yourself into a future you haven’t yet earned.

This is in line with what Gail, one of last year’s seniors said was the most helpful thing for her in the transition. She said that loosing the 10 week evaluation cycle left her drifting, overwhelmed by the new time scale of her ventures. She said that disciplining herself to set and revisit a series of short and long term goals that was really significant to help her get a handle on the life stage. So, you want to Navigate the New Normal of life after college? 1)Learn to work with God, 2) Become the church and 3) Build or Venture…
…and that is fine for seniors. But what about the rest of you? Well, we probably won’t give this talk again next year…so you should probably consider this your exit seminar. But there are a couple ways that these ideas can inform your college years.

Thoughts for Underclassmen
1. Hit the Summer hard.

Its good training. Get in a church, work hard, keep up the disciplines, set aside the video game console and find something useful to do whether or not you get paid, make intentional contact with CL friends in your area and practice making new friends outside of the campus environment.

2. Get Momentum into the transition.

Several people told me that having that next thing already lined up when they graduated was the most helpful thing for them in the transition. So, Juniors, spend THIS summer deciding what grad schools or internships you want to apply to (even if you have NO IDEA what you want to do or if grad school is even for you). Set aside a couple hours a week to prayerfully surf these web sites. Take initiative in the process of deciding. And find a vocational mentor early on who can help you think about it (btw Natalia, Michelle was just telling me how you are doing this for her). The deadline for many grad schools and missions opportunities is January 1 and it comes and goes before many seniors even notice. How might you want to build or venture...you need to think about this early if you are going to get momentum into the transition. Don’t give up on the year after undergrad until it is upon you because it seems overwhelming. Put intentional thought and energy into what you want to do...and then send out a variety of applications that will help you build or venture.

Because you will NEVER have more energy or capacity than you do right now. Seriously, I fall asleep most nights at 9:30 whether I want to or not...it is currently past my bed time...I am on the verge of falling asleep right now mid sentence...and I'm not even THAT old. Now is the time to do the ‘hard thing’ whether it is grad school, or peace corps, or missions, or to taking a REAL, sustained shot at an artistic dream, or to do a ministry internship in Wisconsin with Adam Darbonne (which is a possibility – if you’re interested come talk to me). Years in your early 20’s – before you have kids - are incredibly precious in retrospect. You WILL wish you did more with them. Get purposeful momentum into the transition.

Finally, undergrads…

3. Leave it on the Field at College.

I think the best predictor of how this transition will go for you is how you handle your senior year. If your senior year is largely spent looking ahead, you may be the kind of person who does a lot of ‘looking back’ once you are out of here.

I want to close with a quote from one of the funniest people I know…Bronwyn Murphy. I am convinced that the Murphy’s could be a sit com…I’d watch that. They are hilarious. And there would probably be so much sports talk in that sit com, that it could probably air on ESPN. But it would also be the one of the most insightful things on television. So Bronwyn weighed in on this transition for me, and it got real…listen to what she said.

One of the biggest tragedies I have witnessed is graduating seniors refusing to finish strong (classes, ministry, relationships) in the present because they are so focused on the future. Once they graduate, they become inefficient and frankly joy-less in the present as they long for what was in the past (roommates, fellowship, relationships, DC late night)…Both miss entirely the blessings of God in the present.

But if you embrace your senior year for all of its complexity and melancholy and ‘leave it on the field’ in your classes and ministry, then you are probably the kind of person who will find God’s best in a new, totally different situation. If you practice thankfulness, if you wage contentment…you will build the spiritual muscles that will help you through this transition…and the ones coming…the joys and boredoms of parenthood…the estrangement and grace of a difficult season of marriage…the terrors and beauty of adult children…the horror and adjustment of a serious illness…the melancholy and faithfulness of getting old.

It starts now…with embracing THIS season…like a grown up…balancing vocation, community, family and ministry when you come back in the Fall. I’ll see you then.


Note: I have accumulated footnotes and deleted sceens from this talk in a seperate post

The Wall Crossers of Antioch: (Acts 11&13)

Note: In this talk I lean heavily on the works of two thinkers and I would like to provide two links that provide acces to more of their ideas.
First: Tim Keller has 6+ free MP3’s on the Church and the city here.

Second: I wrote a summary of Rodney Stark’s book The Rise of Early Christianity and implications for the contemporary church that can be found here).

Acts 11:19-30

Acts 13:1-3

I find that most people have heard of Antioch…but can’t quite remember where? So I have put together the following, totally unscientific, survey of where people have heard of Antioch.

"O Lord, bless this thy hand grenade, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy." And the Lord did grin. And the people did feast upon the lambs and sloths, and carp and anchovies, and orangutans and breakfast cereals…then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it.”

Seriously, that is an iconic scene. Last Christmas Eve I was visiting my brother at his church. A couple thousand people were passing through that church that night and he is the associate pastor. So I was a little taken aback when he tried to get my attention during the music from like 40 ft away. He mouthed these words, “Hly hnd gnd o ntch’ while pointing at the Christmas tree. I couldn’t figure out what he was trying to say, until I looked at the tree. He was pointing at this ornament.

The maker of this ornament was either hilariously oblivious or hilariously hilarious.

But tonight, we are going to resume our journey through the story of the earliest church with the account of the church in Antioch. It honestly, seems a little anti-climactic to jump back into Acts after that relationships series. But, we need to be careful not to distort the Scriptures by letting our questions totally dictate our study. It is appropriate to bring our questions to the text, which is why Dan and I try to topical talks about 25% of the time. We ned to let the scriptures speak about what they want to speak about in the proportion they want to speak about it. But, on the whole, the text should set the agenda. Fortunately, Luke starts out today’s passage with a little recap.

11:19 ‘those who had been scattered by the persecution in connection with Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch, telling the message only to Jews’ 20 But, there were some…who on coming to Antioch spoke to the Greeks also, telling them the good news of Jesus.”

After a very good start, where the church grew like crazy and enjoyed a relatively good relationship with the surrounding community, the new Christians began to be hunted down and killed. They were getting stoned…and not in the fun way. In the moment this must have been really confusing, but in retrospect, God used it to chase them out of the safe confines of Jerusalem and start to bring the story and message of Jesus throughout the Roman empire.

Until now, Christianity remained, largely a Jewish movement. (11:19 ‘telling the message only to Jews.') We have seen isolated incidents of pagans becoming Christians. If you recall Kevin’s talk about the Ethiopian and my talk about Cornelius a Roman bad ass last quarter. But what was about to take place in Antioch was a total game changer. The fledgling Christian movement would never be the same again.[2] It is in Antioch, that the movement gets the name we still use today. And appropriately so, because it is in Antioch that Jesus’ command in chapter 1, that his name would be spread to the ends of the earth becomes a reality.

It all starts with two upstart, unnamed, self-motivated Christians from Cyprus.[3] These guys decide to try something totally crazy. They decide to try to plant a church in one of the most pagan, cosmopolitan, diverse, and divided cities in the Roman Empire. I guarantee you that people laughed at them. But to everyone’s shock, it goes incredibly well. The church hadn’t seen growth like this since Peter preached that first message back in chapter 2. And things would never be the same again. And so the Church in Jerusalem sends Barnabas to see what is going on. Barnabas not only approves of the church, but stays on to help and recruits Paul…and the Church spreads like no other world view in human history over the next 300 years from this remarkable church.

So, this passage begs us to ask one overwhelming questions…why? What was it about the church in Antioch that made it so effective? I am going to argue that there were three things that made the church in Antioch particularly effective. Three things that we can learn from this remarkable community. It was 1) Urban, 2) Misisonal, and 3) Multicultural.

1) The Antioch Church Thrived Because it was Urban

First, it was urban. One of the most obvious but least frequently observed features of the early church is that it was primarily an urban movement. Early Christianity thrived on the density, desperation, depravity and diversity of the great urban centers of the Roman empire. You can argue from this passage, that the movement didn’t really take off until it hit a major urban center. There is that scene in Braveheart where Wallace spreads oil over the enemy battle field. When a flaming arrow is shot at the nearby grass the blaze spread slowly until it hit the oil, and then it took off. This is the a good picture of how Acts and historical sources describe the growth of the church. It plugged along slowly until it hit the cities. Then it took off at a qualitatively different rate.

Antioch was the 3rd largest city in the Roman world[4]. You can think of it as the Chicago of the Roman world (behind LA and NY).[5] It was 10-20 times larger than Jerusalem. And, not only were there a lot of people, but they were packed in. Rodney Stark estimated the population density of Antioch at 195 persons per acre. Compare this to 100 for Manhattan, 122 for Calcutta and 183 for Mumbai (Bombay)…but Antioch had no buildings >4 stories high...and no toilets.

So why point this out. Isn’t essentially a historical curiosity. It is important to recognize because the urban nature of the early church was fundamental to its growth and effectiveness. The early church grew because it was a fundamentally urban movement. It grew because it came to love people and found them easiest to love in their densest, most diverse and most desperate state.

Tim Keller (to whom I owe most of my thought on this topic) says: “The more urban the environment, the bigger the city the more Christianity flourished. The more dense the population, the more pluralistic, the more crime the more poverty, the more social troubles, the more personal brokenness, the cityer the city the deeper the fruit in quality and quantity that the gospel bore.”

But somehow, contemporary evangelical Christianity has become one of the most anti-urban demographics of the American population. With the notable exceptions of the Black Church and the Catholic Church, modern American Christianity has gravitated to the suburbs. And, modern missiologists argue, this is sidelining us culturally. We are underrepresented in the city. And this is problematic in two ways. First, Christians should be wherever there are people and should be particularly attracted to the social ills that cities generate. But it is also a problem because culturally, Cities are upstream.[6] As the city goes, so goes the culture.

Keller again, “American Christians are the most anti-urban Christians in the world and as a result American cities are the most underserved by Christians. (It would take) 10% of evangelical Christians in this country to move into cities to live proportionally…Jew(ish people) for example, gay people for example, Asian people, Black and Hispanic people all live disproportionately in cities, and as a result the have a lot more cultural power, and they deserve it, because there they are …until evangelicals are willing to live in the city they can stop bellyaching about what’s going wrong with the culture.”

Cities are not more important but they are more strategic. If we were going to be underrepresented somewhere, it should be anywhere but our nation and world’s urban centers. It is the one place early church was overrepresented. This may be a particularly tough message for some of you, because, many of you could have gone to Berkeley or UCLA but chose Davis because of precisely how urban it wasn’t. You may hate the city. But you are going to have to get use to urban life sooner or later, because after the final day, when God establishes his kingdom and remakes the world, he describes the new realm of his eternal reign a great city. Eternity is going to be urban. You don’t read in the scriptures about a great escatalogical suburb coming down from heaven.

So what about us now? We are aggies? We go to a school that has, no kidding, over 100 cows (including this one) on campus[7] and a road called dairy drive. Well, in two weeks, I am going to argue from Acts 17, that the only thing in the same strategic ballpark as the city is the University. That is why Amanda and I are spending a season here. And you should make the most of your few years of influence in one of our world’s great academic institutions. But what I want you to get from this observation is: ‘Don’t run from the city.’ In the next 1 to 4 years you are going to be making some big life choices with your most flexible years. When you look for jobs, when you are choosing where to live, at least don’t avoid the city…and, maybe, pursue it.

2) The Antioch Church Thrived Because it was Missional

Second, the church in Antioch was fundamentally missional. They were the prototypical ‘externally focused church.’ They embodied the idea that has emerged from Acts all year, that the Church is one of the few organizations that exists primarily for the benefit of those that don’t belong to it.

Rodney Stark (University of Washington sociologist) wrote a great book trying to answer the question of how Christianity spread so dramatically in those first few hundred years. It is a scholarly work and when he started it he wasn’t a believer. He credits the study, in part with his reluctant and complicated conversion. But he says the unparalleled growth of the early church was largely due to “growth through social networks, through a structure of direct and interpersonal attachments. Most new religious movements fail because they quickly become closed, or semiclosed networks. That is, they fail to keep forming and sustaining attachments to outsiders and thereby lose the capacity to grow. Successful movements discover techniques for remaining open networks, able to reach out into new adjacent social networks.” In other words, Christianity exploded because, even though, as we have seen earlier in Acts, they couldn’t seem to get enough of each other, they never ghettoized. They continued to maintain connections to the people itn their city that they were called to love.

But, one of the really interesting things about this passage is that the church saw its missional call as having two distinct facets: i) Incarnational and ii) Proclamaitonal. Or in other words, they engaged their community and the surrounding communities in WORD and DEED.

i) Incarnational

Look with me in v 27-30. They take up a collection for a famine in Jerusalem.[8] They take an intentional and active interest in the physical and felt needs of suffering people. And, on top of this, they cross ethnic and tribal lines to do it. The Antioch church was probably composed mostly of Greeks and Roman, who did not flinch at the prospect of seneding help to the mostly Jewish community. This is almost unprecedented in the ancient world. And I kept thinking of this passage (where two prophets challenged the church to give) when two weeks ago, when Steph and Cassia stood up here and essentially said, ‘something horrible has happened, and Jesus’ people have to do something.’ That night you gave over $700 to help the Hatian people.[9]

ii) Proclamational

So the early church was serious about working hard and giving hard to help meet the estimable needs of their city. But they also believed that the story of Jesus and his victory over sin and death needed to be told. So they did something crazy.

Antioch may have had the best preaching lineup of all time[10]. Mark Driscoll likes to say, ‘Can you imagine going to church in Antioch at this time, when just one of your five preachers is the Apostle Paul.’[11] It would have been easy for them to just sit back and enjoy that.[12] Surely some of the new Christians could be spared for the purpose of planting new churches without anyone noticing. Maybe it could even be social awkward ones that people didn’t get along with. But, instead, they set aside Paul and Barnabas. They hoard gifts but tasked their very best with the responsibility of starting up new Jesus communities. They were open to dramatic change if it meant that more people would have the chance to respond to Jesus.[13] They committed their A-team to ministry OUTSIDE the church.[14]

Throughout the history of the church, individual congregations have been tempted to elevate one of these over the others. Within a given church, it is tempting for those passionate about proclamation to get really annoyed by those who want to focus on incarnation…and the feelings are mutual. But a healthy congregation is passionate about both.

One last thought on this point: It is not incidental that this missional congregation is also a congregation described as one committed to worship[15], prayer[16], fasting[17] and deeply in tune with the Holy Spirit[18]. True worship is never simply inward or therapeutic…it should always lead to an outward, missional focus. Worship is dangerous.[19] The presence of God can produce marching orders.[20]

3) The Antioch Church Thrived Because it was Diverse

Finally, the new center of the early church was the most diverse, cosmopolitan city in the Roman empire…and I am convinced that this is not an incidental detail on why it became one of the most effective congregations in Church history. Antioch was a global city, and its inhabitants included large African, Asian, Middle Eastern and Western populations. In addition there is historical evidence of significant Persian, Indian, and Chinese neighborhoods in Antioch. The city was so diverse that it was split into at least 18 walled ethnic quarters (ghettos). Selucis who built Antioch, didn’t just build walls around the city, but large walls to separate the ethnic groups from each other.

But the church in Antioch appeared to be a reflection of the diversity of the city from the start. We see that from the description of the leadership team. The leadership team included a Jewish Pharisee, a black dude, a Roman, a Levite who was ethnically Greek, and a Greek prince of the Roman Empire.

Stott: “These five men, therefore, symbolized the ethnic and cultural diversity of Antioch.” The represented 3 continents and 4 different ethnic groups.

And this is why were they called ‘Christians’ first in Antioch. The name was made up because the Jesus followers were ‘wall crossers.’ They transcended the categories of their day. And those who tried to describe the movement realized that they needed to invent a new category for a religion that was not based on a national aleigence.[21] One of the defining characteristics of the early church was its ethic diversity…its ability to embrace the contributions of people from hugely diverse backgrounds and transcend the bitterest social divisions their culture maintained.[22]

Let me wrap us by trying to illustrate this point with a story. After I graduated from Grad School (the first time) I got a job in Buffalo, NY. We got a place downtown (because we believe that Christians should live in the city whenever possible). A few days after we moved in we went to the DMV to get our New York licenses. It was fifteen blocks or so away. But it might have been 15 of the most influential blocks of my life. When we arrived at the DMV I realized that I had not seen a single white person since we had left our apartment. I remember thinking, this thing (where the white people live and go to church in the suburbs and the African Americans and Latinos live and go to church in the city) is broken. This can’t be God’s best for his diverse creation. The Church should transcend even the most deeply felt cultural divisions. So we decided to put ourselves in the place of cultural learners and cross the Sunday morning color line. We found a remarkable little church on the edge of the east side, pastored by Emory Brown, (a man we retain a huge amount of affection for). The church was mostly black, but the elders were composed of two black men, Emory and the worship leader, a white guy who led the children’s church, a gentleman of mixed Black/Italian ethnicity and a Korean PhD student. This was the modern equivalent of the Antioch 5.

But what we didn’t know was that the reason people don’t often choose to transcend cultural divisions together isn’t because it doesn’t occur to them, it’s because it turns out to be really hard. We joined the church and asked the elders to put us to work. We were assigned to the youth ministry under the leadership of Calvin and Darlene Fitzgerald. We later found out that Calvin had only been out of prison for a couple years where he had been part of the Nation of Islam and various black power groups and Darlene had only been clean for a couple years…and was HIV positive. They did not try to hide their brokenness, but they connected with urban youth effortlessly.

They didn’t like us much from the start and I can’t say we warmed up to them. Calvin’s idea of a useful youth volunteer was someone who would pick up kids from the most dangerous neighborhoods and who could preach without notice. The meeting would get to the point where it seemed appropriate for some teaching and he would read a random passage and tell me to get up and teach on it. Now those of you who know me know that I think it is deplorable that anyone would presume to teach the contents of God’s holy self revelation without a lot of preparation. I had my first outline of this talk completed 11 months ago. So Calvin and I began to butt heads…regularly. I arrogantly felt like he wasn’t deep enough into the scriptures to have anything to say. He felt like I was too culturally removed from the students to have anything to say. He went to the elders to ask to have us reassigned. The elders refused, and told him to learn how to use us. Let’s just say, things were not going well…until the day of what I will call the ‘rib incident.’

One day Calvin called me up and asked me to meet him for dinner. We sat down at Casa de Pizza and he said, ‘Let me order.’ He ordered something like 45 barbecue ribs and then turned to me and said, ‘I don’t know what kinds of leafy green stuff white people eat, but we’ll do that next time.’ What I didn’t know was that that huge bowl of sparsely meated cow bones was a peace offering. We talked for a long time. He told me that about his black power background and even confessed ‘until very recently I hated all white people.’ I confessed that I was culturally adrift in the youth ministry, that I was having trouble connecting with the kids and had a lot to learn about urban life…but that I could be taught if he took the time to mentor me. And things were never the same. A couple months later when his kid ended up sick and in the hospital we visited them, not because it was the right thing to do, but because we had deep and genuine affection for them. A couple after that, Calvin had to pass an algebra exam (he was going back to school to become a caterer and chef) and asked me to tooter him. He started to utilize Amanda and I as part of his team and we learned things about urban youth ministry, the ghetto and the kids from them that we would have never picked up on our own. We took the ministry over a year later when Calvin and Darlene moved on, but simply would not have been able to without his mentoring. If God had not made us look at this Jesus follower who could not have been more different than us and recognize ‘he has stuff to teach us’…or if they had been written us off as unusable and been unwilling to teach us…the ministry would have not been nearly as helpful to those students who were struggling to live for Jesus in some of the nations toughest schools and would have ended when they left. This relationship could have been undone by my pride or his bitterness. It could have been undone by his pride or my bitterness. But Jesus heals that crap, and my making us both willing to learn, he built a better team to reach these kids.

In the book of Acts God makes it pretty clear that the collection of his people that would come to be called the Church, was not to be like the world. It was to be more not less diverse. It would transcend the cultural divisions of the surrounding society…but it would not necessarily be easy. It would require humility. But the church is God’s fullest expression of his kingdom when it, not only transcends the divisions that plague the surrounding culture, but embraces all his passions and has grace for each of their champions.
______________

[1] Same words as 8:4 – suggesting that the interveining material (of the mission in Samaria and the events with Cornelius) were preparing the church to deal with a full scale multi-cultural explosion
[2] ‘But the scale of Gentile evangelization in Antioch was something entirely new.’ FF Bruce
[3] There are rich implications of even this minor insight. First, the world wide, 2000 year and running, multi-billion member Christian movement can be traced back to two people who just decide to try something crazy. Second, Christianity is not and has never been meant to be a centralized, authoritative thing. It crumbles and dies in that form. It is a grass roots movement with the Holy Spirit organically using whoever is available. However, there is leadership and followership, even in the early church as these teachers submitted to Barnabas when he showed up to do an orthodoxy/orthopraxy check.
[4] There were a million people in Rome and the others not far behind – in 1850 only 4 cities over a million – we are just catching up with the urbanization of the Roman empire. (Keller)
[5] This came from Keller, but, then again, so did most of this point. I will try to city frequently, but so much of my thought on this topic has come from Keller that you should probobly just consider this whole point inextricably indebted to him.
[6] - James Davidson Hunter
[7] And the facilities to accomidate for 650.
[8] Boyce: “As far as I know, this is the first charitable act of this nature in all recorded history – on race of people collecting money to help another people. No wonder they were called Christians first at Antioch.”
[9] We also know, that 150 years later, they church was still incarnationally missional. Bishop Fabious wrote that in 251, the church in Antioch had grown to 30,000 people and was financially supporting ‘more than 1,500 widows and distressed persons.’ (Stark)
[10] Notice, that all accounts and instructions about early church leadership describe a teaching/leading team. The verse says ‘teachers and prophets’ Again, Boyce: “We have fallen away from thaty principle in our time through a pattern of organization in which churches usually are in the hands of just one minister.” Also see my discussion of this wrt the earliest non-canonical documents of the church under point 4 of this post
[11] This is a paraphrase from memory. It is probably not an exact rendering.
[12] Wright: “To be told, suddenly, that two of the main leaders were wanted elsewhere must have come as something of a blow.”
[13] ‘Missionary activity was not an addendum to a faith that was basically ‘about’ something else…’Christianity was never more itself than in the launching of the world mission’…The story of Acts is the story…of early Christian mission…World missions is thus the first and most obvious feature of early Christian Praxis.’ NT Wright – ‘The New Testament and the People of God’ 360-1 – Dan and I read this book together and his comment on this passage was ‘Missions is not an optional program of the church. You can be ‘kind of not into’ Men’s Ministry or Women’s ministry. But we all have to be into mission.'
[14] “We know that Judea did in fact suffer severely from a famine at some point between AD 45 and 48.” Bruce
[15] NT Wright: “We get a fascinating glimpse of their regular (corporate) devotional life: fasting and prayer surrounding the worship of the Lord, waiting for the spirit to give fresh direction.”
[16] Piper “It is almost impossible to overstate the historical importance of what happened here…in this prayer meeting.”
[17] Stott: “In neither reference to fasting does it occur alone. It is linked with worship in verse 2 and with prayer in verse 3. For seldom if ever is fasting an end in itself. It is the negative action (abstenention from food and other distractions) for the sake of the positive one (worshiping and praying).”
[18] Side note: The Early Fathers leaned heavily on this passage and others like it to establish the divinity of the Spirit as the third person of the Trinity. He is commanding and obeyed as God. Boyce puts it really well, I think: ‘rather than thinking of the Holy Spirit (as) a power that we are somehow wo seize and use, we are to think of him as a person whose job it is to use us.”
[19] ‘We get a fascinating glimpse of their regular devotional life: fasting and prayer surrounding the worship of the Lord, waiting for the spirit to give fresh direction…to be told, suddenly, that two of the main leaders were wanted elsewhere must have come as something of a blow.” Wright p3
[20] Dan has declared this ‘the year of the Spirit’ and rightly so, because
Many of us probably feel a little squeamish about a focus on the spirit, because we have encountered what we might consider an undue emphasis on his work. But a true emphasis on the Holy Spirit should not lead to navel gazing or the pursuit of signs, but on obedience in serving and sharing with those outside the church.
[21] The wall crossers thing is from Keller.
[22] I recognized that come CL’s have made an intentional choice to help diversify our community just by being part of it. Some of you could have chosen ethnic based Christian fellowships. The choice would have been understandable. But I am personally grateful for each person who takes a risk on our not-so-divers community, bringing the correction and insight (and a portion of the image of God) from an underrepresented background.