meeting with gerry

I just got done with my meeting with Gerry which is pronounced ‘Gary’ not ‘Jerry’. He is a seminary professor and he has been pretty influential in the church planting movement. I am not sure what I was hoping for so I was not disappointed. We talked about multi-site and social justice. Gerry did not express any concern about the growing trend of multi-site churches. He views multi-ste having no conflict with church planting. They are both strategies and they can both be done well and both can be done poorly. He did emphasis the need for a healthy site or campus to have a gifted leadership team and a focus on their geographical area. That gives mission to a given community and helps them be more than a franchise and more than a venue that you can watch a video.

He repeatedly expressed that onsite leadership was a must. They must differentiate themselves through other methods than the sermon. I still have a lot of questions but I'm least persuaded that the multi-site model is not inherently unbiblical. He told several stories of how it can be a great model. We did not unpack what this model communicates about community, discipleship, etc. Maybe his books on the issue will help.

I then asked Gerry his thoughts on the church engaging in social justice and if they were going too far towards deed and away from Word. He thinks we, the American church, have not gone far enough. He feels that evangelicalism is moving in the right direction of expressing their faith through deeds and should keep moving further in that direction. However we must work off a biblical and not social understanding of justice. He defined justice as putting ourselves in a position of less power for the sake of another and that injustice was seeing our stuff as our stuff. This is in contrast to social justice being the process of dividing wealth evenly throughout all people. He felt that the latter understanding creates social dependence and an unhealthy class system. God came down and became less.

I am not really sure exactly what this could look like lived out but that is the gist from our time and a helpful framework to process through.