I’m having some thoughts on our future together and wanted to share them with you. It’s a bit long but take your time to sift through it. I think it will be worth your while.

I’ll start with a fragment of an email conversation between my friend Alex McManus and a couple of leaders from the UK. Enjoy.

The Minimum Structure Needed for a Mission Movement

Q: The UK is now advanced in secularization and with this comes the isolation of traditional forms of church. We desperately need new ways of understanding and being church. What are the minimum structures needed (buildings and government) [to be effective on mission]?

A: In apostolic times, buildings, budgets, nor seminary degrees were necessary to ignite an explosive movement that influenced the Roman Empire within the brief span of three hundred years. The minimum structure to move heaven and make a significant impact on the UK is one human being who MUST.

The emphasis here is on the person who is compelled by love to do whatever is required to reach people for the Kingdom. This is a far weightier issue, in my view, than is asking what structures are necessary to reach people. The person who is compelled by love to reach the outsider is the right kind of person around which to create a passionate missional community or structure.

A cultural architect is one who understands that the role of a leader is to create a missional culture. This missional culture is one that legitimizes decisions that “work” for the outsiders, those we are trying to reach, over those decisions about what works for insiders only. A cool articulation of this value in a mission statement isn’t enough. This architecture must be embodied in a person in order for it to be real. The person who MUST matters.

In selecting church planters it isn’t enough to find someone who “wants” to plant a church. The right person “has to” reach people, “must” impact culture, and they’ll attempt it with or without our money, our buildings, and our structures.

May their tribe increase!

I think the essential question with regard to mission in the UK, the west, and the world is: Do we have to? You used the word “desperate” in your email so I sense that we are kindred spirits in this matter. We have to.

In this missional community that we call The Spring we pray for the increase of those who MUST. It’s nice to have those who “are willing to,” and those who “want to,” but have no doubt that the world around us remains essentially unchanged until the arrival of those who MUST.

While in Alaska this last week I watched a video of a young mother bear protecting her cubs from an aggressive bear at least twice her size. Now, had this conflict been over food, or shelter, or social status, I have no doubt that she would have conceded the battle. Why? Because those things just weren’t as important to her as her own life. But this conflict was a different matter altogether. The larger bear made the crucial mistake of engaging her over something that she MUST do. I’m sure you can guess how it ended. He tasted a few swipes of her MUST and ran for his life. Size is never the issue. Neither is talent, or training, or experience. MUST is the issue. People who MUST are driven, dedicated, and yes, extremely dangerous.

We need you, the world needs you, you need you—to become a person who MUST. But how shall we hope that this is accomplished here at The Spring? Shall we attempt to guilt you into it? Or perhaps I should lay upon you an overwhelming sense of duty by using words like “should” and “ought.” No, for far too long the church has misunderstood MUST as “should” and “ought.”

Then where does this MUST come from? It, like every other truly good thing about us, MUST be an overflow, an outflow, a spring. To live a life truly worth living you MUST fall in love. To fall in love you must behold Beauty and become its’ captive. This kind of captivity is internal in nature. It’s not about outward force or social coercion. The captivity of love is about the holy terror of having all your desires, all your goals, all your interests, bound to this one end. “I have beheld BEAUTY and now I am its’ prisoner.”

“But Dean, I’m longing to connect with Him in this way but I’m just not seeing Him and it’s breaking my heart.”

GOOD! Our journey begins with longing. And before longing is the longing to long. It is the yearning to desire Him. We find in our hearts an awakening that beckons longing and paves the way for desire. It begins with the Lord Himself placing His divine drawing upon the heart of the one who loves Him. We find ourselves desiring to desire Him and pained by the present shallowness of our hearts. He awakens us to the great obsession of Himself, and we find this new ache within our hearts: our lack of love and absence of tenderness. We begin to hunger for the capacity to hunger. We begin to thirst for the ability to thirst. The longing to long is the escort into longing itself. It is the God-ordained gateway into the true gift of God to crave Him with all of our beings.

Longing is the echo of eternity within our souls. It is that which sets us apart and makes us pilgrims on the journey. This world is not our home, and our inner ache gives testimony to the brevity of life and the weight of eternity. “I am a stranger in the earth; do not hide Your commandments from me. My soul breaks with longing for your judgments…” (Ps. 119:19-20). Something within us reaches for One who is other than and for a realm that is beyond. We long for One whom we have not yet seen but we love (1 Pet. 1:8). With hearts empowered by a divine ache, we cry out for more of God. We search for any sign of Him. This is the precise position that He wants us to be in. It is the hungry that He fills. It is the desirous that He satisfies.

Part of the actual knowledge or experience of Him in intimacy is the longing for that experience. The longing prior to the felt experience is just as much a part of loving Him as the experience itself. They go hand in hand and cannot be separated. The initial longing is an irreplaceable part of the eternal intimacy. Both the craving and the satisfaction are equal parts of the gift of intimacy. It all plays a role in the impartation of Divine Love to our hearts. Oh, the gift of longing for God! Oh, treasured companion on the journey! We need the longing for the entirety of our way forward. Longing and our ache for His greater revealing are here to stay.

Love’s Holy Delay

“Tell me, O you whom I love, where you feed Your flock, where you make it rest at noon. For why should I be as one who veils herself by the flocks of your companions?” (Song Sol. 1:7).

In Song of Solomon 1:7, the young maiden inquires of the Lord where He feeds His flock. She has just told the Lord in verse two that His love is better than wine. She knows His love far exceeds all other pleasures. Her whole life vision has changed because of this foundational revelation. Yet the mere acknowledgement of His love’s superiority is not what will ultimately satisfy her hungry heart. Though she has been overcome with the vision of His great love, her heart is still hungry to actually experience it. Only He Himself can answer the craving in her soul. She must personally partake of His love in order to find satisfaction. She must drink in order for her thirst to be quenched. She asks with desperation, “Tell me where can I go to drink of You; where do I feast upon this love?”

She is saying, “Where do You cause my heart to be satisfied with You and You alone? How is it that a soul drinks deeply of You? For now I MUST. I am ruined for lesser pleasures. You are my Reward. Now I know that You are exceedingly broad. Who can know the vastness of Your personality? I know that there is more to You than I can fathom or imagine. You are the Ocean, and I stand gazing from the shore. I MUST. I have been ruined to all else by an awakening, but now my pain is greater than before. The high vision is before me, but I know only hunger and desperation as my reality.”

She had not anticipated a delay in experiencing the pleasures of His love. She gave her wholehearted “yes” to the life vision of holy passion yet now finds herself in an unexpected quiet. Here she waits, she MUST, ruined for lesser pleasures and kept from Divine consolations, in the boundless space between her passion and the beautiful experience of His. He is cultivating longing in her heart. He desires more than a recognition of His greatness; He wants a desperation and lovesick yearning to come to maturity within her. And so for a time she remains in this breach between the reach for and the fulfillment of superior pleasures. She is ruined by the vision of His BEAUTY. She now knows He is altogether lovely and that no other pursuit will ever satisfy the deep cravings of her heart. Yet He keeps her here in this Divine delay for a season and she only knows the ache of longing and not the pleasure of its answer. She only knows the wound of love and not the actual experience of His healing cure.

This is the pattern of His way with our hearts; knowing this should bring great consolation to our hearts. He is actually drawing us in the delay. He is enlarging the capacity of our hearts to experience the pleasure of His presence by withholding it. This is the perfect, Divine wisdom of the Lover of our souls, to bring us forth, to His side, leaning and loving, a pure and spotless bride, a people who MUST!

I’d love to hear your feedback on all of this. Don’t keep me waiting too long!

Love,
Dean
The Spring … Life is coming to the suburban desert.

“Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.” —Theodore Roosevelt

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