No Perfect People Allowed

So this will be short, but I wanted to recommend the book “No Perfect People Allowed: Creating a Come As You Are Culture in the Church” by John Burke to everyone. (Unless your name is Marc Nettleton and you think that the name of his book disqualifies you from going to Burke’s church! Kidding…)

John Burke is the pastor of Gateway Church in Austin, Texas, the church that most of his stories and experiences in the book come from. Before becoming a pastor in Texas and his work on staff with Willow Creek, Burke was involved with campus ministry in California (more on this in a second) until he decided that it wasn’t for him.

Although he never explicitly states it, it is obvious that the ministry he was involved (and on staff) with was Campus Crusade. He talks of using “neatly outlined four-point booklets” to share the Gospel, initiative evangelism, and through his many stories uses several metaphors and ideas that anyone familiar with Crusade would recognize in an instant.

What is interesting to me is how the training and teaching that he has received from Crusade has meshed with his heart for the Church and his desire to see the Body of Christ generously dish out grace and the opportunity for community in the post-Christian, post-modern culture of the United States. Though he’s traded in his Four Laws booklet for the chance to usher people through their spiritual journeys by teaching from the pulpit, he still continues to use much of the training and experience that he’s had from doing initiative evangelism on campus in a church atmosphere that is consistent with the emerging Church in America. That is, showing people what it means to have a relationship with Jesus through a welcoming community and exploring the Scriptures rather than having one-time, 15-minute conversations with people using a booklet.

I’m in no way knocking Campus Crusade or saying that one way is better than another (in fact, both methods overlap considerably) and I’m certain that Burke would not do so either. I’m even encouraged by the fact that though initiative evangelism has taken a backseat to what he’s trying to accomplish through Gateway Church, his experiences in college ministry have aided him in better explaining the Gospel in the relationships with the drug addicts, homosexuals, feminists, atheists, and other churchgoers that Gateway has attracted due to their welcoming, relational church culture.

Everyone is seeking community, whether in Austin, Texas or as freshmen at the UW, a fact which John Burke and Gateway Church embraces, and when we recognize the fact that all of us are messed-up and it’s going to take more than a short, persuasive presentation of the Gospel to bring people back to a right relationship with God, we can move beyond “tolerance” and start utilizing the Church’s greatest and most attractive weapon: grace.