“God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself… When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.”

– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

I have long wanted to plant a church. I have dreamt of all the evils of the conventional church I could rectify and the many values of Jesus I could exemplify if only I could gather some people together with me. Without the restraints of corrupt church practices, without the taint of a church history, we could then be free to become everything the church should have always been.

On this road toward church-planting it doesn’t take long to discover the well-trodden path toward a successful institution:

Number 1: Discern your call. If you aren’t called to church-planting you’ll quit. Cause it’s hard.

Number 2: Pick where you are planting. Location and demographics are key.

Number 3: Determine your vision.

This is where everything hinges—upon your vision. If people don’t catch your vision, they won’t join what you’re trying to do. If people don’t join what you’re trying to do, then you won’t be able to accomplish the vision. So you become a vision-salesman. You must learn to articulate and then re-articulate until all are able to recite your vision verbatim. Once your vision has been caught and others are articulating it, the thing will spread like wildfire. But you must do maintenance on the vision and keep people motivated. And if everything goes as planned, lots of people will join you in the pursuit of what could be. 

But is this the way it ought to be?

Besides the fact that I cringe at the thought of being a salesman (if even well-intentioned)… I sometimes wonder if we are focused on what could be because we lack the resolve to make something exist presently. And so we gather together large numbers of people resolving to be something we dream of, and yet day-after-day we wake up and live in the shadow of our illusions. With each new day we are more and more in danger of letting this shadow of the ideal become our comfortable shade from the ideal.

I’m quite certain Jesus employed vision throughout the whole of his ministry, but not as some abstract ideal to be achieved when all the resources would fall into place. When he says to his future disciples, “Follow me, I will make you fishers of men,” he does not say so without inviting them into a present reality (the following him) or the assurance that such a “vision” is really no vision the way we think of it—it was a reality he would personally secure with certainty (I will make you fishers of men). And other times he asked individuals to follow him, they were required to “take  up their cross” or “sell all their possessions” as a prerequisite to follow. Talk about counter-intuitive church-planting tactics… 

Could it be that all our vision-casting—with its competitive drive to stand out from other visions, with its focus on realities far too distant, and its questionable success rate to actually produce the desired results—could it be that this method is great for making large movements, but left wanting in terms of building Jesus’ church? And what kind of people has this attracted but those who continually look to something that will demand their participation but never presently?

What if we were able to call people into a tangible reality instead of a distant ideal? What if we asked people to join us in a path we are already walking, not meet up with us somewhere down the road? Gone would be the unrealistic expectations we conjurred for ourselves, and the legion of paralyzed followers who have been required to do nothing but believe in a future never-to-be-realized.

I say if we want a church that cares for the poor then we get together now and care for the poor, even if there are only two or three of us. And if we want a church that welcomes the lowest of the low then we welcome the lowest of the low into our own lives, even if we’re doing it in small numbers. That’s what it would look like to lead no longer from dreams, but with our lives. And when we invite others into the present reality, we shouldn’t ask what could be if only 100 more people cared for the poor together, but  let our current service be pleasing to God where other’s dreams feed and clothe no one.