Fuego: Get 'Em Out of Those Pews!

By Timothy M. Burden

DO YOU WANT TO BUILD A FIRE IN YOUR CHURCH?

Most churches and pastors do not know how to make disciples reach their community, let alone change a nation. I do. In this book I will share stories of transformation and share principles for a strategy that works to renew your church. The strategy is simple and biblically sound. Our present-day

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trilogy Christian Publishing
• Release date: Nov 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9798887382449

Timothy M. Burden

The author served as a pastor in mainline denominational churches, both rural and urban, for over forty-two years. In addition he and his family were full-time missionaries in Youth With A Mission (YWAM) in Amsterdam, Holland. As a Discipleship Training School (DTS) director for three years, he led outreaches in Europe, West Africa, and Mexico. As a pastor he has led teams of youth, families, and adults on transformational mission trips to Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, and Peru.

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¡Fuego!

GET ‘EM OUT OF THOSE PEWS!

WE ARE ALL MISSIONARIES!

by Timothy M. Burden

Fuego

Trilogy Christian Publishers A Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Trinity Broadcasting Network

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Copyright © 2022 by Timothy M. Burden

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.TM Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.TM Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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Trilogy Disclaimer: The views and content expressed in this book are those of the author and may not necessarily reflect the views and doctrine of Trilogy Christian Publishing or the Trinity Broadcasting Network.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 979-8-88738-243-2

E-ISBN: 979-8-88738-244-9

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my amazing and faith-filled wife, Beth. I also want to dedicate this book to my parents, Mark and Leora Burden, especially my mother, who encouraged, supported, and prayed for me in achieving this doctor of ministry degree from which this dissertation came. Finally, I want to dedicate this book to my four children, Rachel, Matthew, David, and Jonathan, who grew up and were part of these mission trips.

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1:

How We Got Here

Chapter 2:

Turning Out the Lights

Chapter 3:

Building a Fire

Chapter 4:

Mission Possible

Chapter 5:

Strategy to Revitalize

Chapter 6:

Making Disciples

Chapter 7:

Epilogue

Postscript

Works Cited and References

Preface

Purpose/Overview

The purpose of this project is to develop a strategy to renew the local church by using short-term mission experiences that promote spiritual formation.

The research question addressed in this paper is how to renew the local church—by using short-term mission experiences to spiritually transform lives that will result in renewed churches.

I want to offer a manual to a local church, thereby turning that church into a mission-sending station and, at the same time, renewing the church in a vision for mission and for spiritual formation of its members. The plan would be to use short-term mission experiences and all their components to bring about spiritual transformation on a personal level.

This project is about spiritual transformation in individual lives, and the tool being used is mission experiences. The goal of the project is both changing lives and radically changing churches. I want to understand and develop a way of doing and being the church that, I think, more resembles the explosive and vital first-century church. I will attempt to show that mission experiences can be effectively used to spiritually transform lives and revitalize the local church.

This is not a strategy to develop another program for a church to implement but a call to action with a tool to use to spiritually transform individuals and revitalize churches. The focus is not on the mission field per se but upon the church and how we can recapture that vision and power to impact the world for Christ. This strategy is offered to churches that show symptoms of poor health and dying. My intent is to approach the church like a physician who sees a patient in poor health and prescribes a way to restore health and fulfillment.

Rationale

Even though I grew up in the church, I did not have a good opinion of missions. In the church I attended, Missions Sunday was often the one to skip. Missionaries would stay over and eat in my home, but even though I was interested in their stories, their clothes, lifestyle, and personalities left a lot to be desired. I was never gripped by the vision that not so apparently gripped their life. And the church was seldom gripped by their vision either.

Missions were often viewed as an appendage of the church, not the blood-pumping organ in the church’s chest. It wasn’t until I was in seminary and attending a church with a very different opinion of missions that I caught a glimpse of God’s heart for the world.

At that church I was exposed to Youth With A Mission (YWAM), a parachurch organization; a new vision for missions and really for the church began to grow. I began to see missions in terms of teams and communities rather than a lone ranger experience. I also saw mission possibilities as short term rather than fifteen years to life. More than anything else, those conceptual changes, for me, opened the door for me to reconsider missions in my own life.

In answering the call to pastoral ministry, I was now wondering how missions fit in the local church. In 1984, my family (wife and two children) and I moved to Amsterdam, Holland, and joined Youth With A Mission. Within a year, I became a Discipleship Training School director and began training young adults from different countries and cultures and then led them on outreaches in various parts of the world. During that time I came to the realization that God was not calling me to be a missionary with a pastor’s heart but a pastor with a missionary’s heart. So in 1987, I returned to Ohio to pastor churches within the United Methodist Church.

As a pastor, I began leading teams of mostly youth from my church and building a vision for missions in churches where there was virtually none. This is how the purpose for this project has taken shape. The Lord began showing me more and more how the church could be and should be a mission base. The church, as a mission base, would be an equipping and training place as well as a supporting and sending base into the mission field. Time after time I would see participants on these trips be affected and changed and return to their churches with the fire of renewal warming others. In turn, for giving their young people to missions, the churches themselves were impacted and stirred with new life.

The biblical precedent is abundant. In Luke 10:1–24, Jesus sends out seventy-two of His followers on a short-term mission experience. In Matthew 10, Jesus instructs the twelve disciples for their mission. But the goal of combining spiritual formation with mission is clearly seen in Mark 3:14–15 (NIV) when Jesus called the twelve disciples out of the crowds of followers, designating them to be apostles, sent ones. Three purposes or priorities were then given: …that they might be with Him and that He might send them out to preach and to have authority to drive out demons. And again, in Matthew 9:35–38, Jesus urged His disciples to carry the burden for the harvest and pray for more workers. The purpose of missions is to reach lost people with the gospel and thus build the church, which is the bride of Christ.

The project is important because it aligns churches with the heart of God. In 2 Corinthians 5:11–21, Paul reminds us that we are called to a ministry of reconciliation. That we no longer live for ourselves but for Jesus, and it is Christ’s love that compels us to be His ambassadors, reconciling the world to God through the message of what Christ did upon the cross.

Acts 1:8 outlines for the church the strategy for the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18–20). But in chapters 1–6 in Acts, the young Jerusalem Church stayed pretty much inside city limits. It seemed to take an outbreak of persecution to get the Christians to spread out and carry out the mission. Charles Mellis called this unintended mobility (Mellis 1976, 12).

The Spirit leads us to reach out to be a vital and healthy church. Failure to reach out results is dying out.

Historically this was the genius of the Methodist movement started by John Wesley. John Wesley ventured out of the confines of the Anglican pulpit, daring to preach the gospel in the open air. Instead of waiting for the people to come to church, Wesley took the church to the people. And to sustain and enhance this evangelistic effort, Wesley formed communities of discipleship and mission called bands, classes, and societies, which transformed lives as well as the church and society.

Howard Snyder points out that Wesley’s strategy was essentially small groups with the goal of spiritual formation and renewal of the church. Wesley refused to preach in any place where he could not follow it up by organizing Societies with adequate leadership (Snyder 1980, 64). Wesley’s goal was to make disciples, and those disciples would renew the church. That’s the goal of my project too.

We live in a day when the institutional, mainline churches are struggling. These churches are struggling with vision and identity in the post-modern world. Issues of mobility and worldview are changing constantly, leaving a dysfunctional church in its wake.

In order for the church to regain its vision and identity, we must get out of our Christian bubble, lay aside our self-focused, individualistic brand of Christianity, meet at the intersection of God’s love and Satan’s world, and apply the kingdom of God. As long as any church is stuck in the pattern of always looking inward, it will struggle with problems of conflict, politics, shortages, and low morale. Short-term mission outreaches have the potential of being an excellent tool to harness and optimize what the Spirit is saying to the church today.

Use of Terms

Leadership: Often defined as the ability to influence behavior and attitude. In this study, leadership will be defined as the ability to influence spiritual formation and build mission vision in the local church.

Christian: A person who has a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ and, by the help of the Holy Spirit, is endeavoring to live daily following Christ.

Church: Often defined as an assembly of called out ones made up of the divinely adopted children of God. It is the body of Christ, constituting a mystical extension of the nature of Christ. The church is a living organism.

Local church: Often defined as the local expression of the church, the body of Christ, on earth.

Mission: Often defined by the Great Commission in Matthew 28:19–20 (NIV) to go …make disciples of all nation, baptizing…and teaching them to obey everything I [Jesus] have commanded you.

Spiritual formation: Is the process of being conformed to the image of Christ (Mulholland 1985, 27).

Renewal: Defined as a gracious act of Sovereign God to restore individual Christians or the church to the right relationship with God and be filled once again with His presence and power.

Discipleship: Defined as learning to follow Jesus Christ daily and teaching others how to follow Jesus Christ and obey His commands.

Church health: If we understand the church as a living organism with systems that promote life and growth, health then is the optimum balance of these systems that result in growth and life.

Short-term missions: Often defined as the period of time anywhere from a weekend to two weeks to two