Leader of Mosaic says he almost tore his church apart to make it successful

What McManus was doing then — putting into play the same convictions about ministry and about what’s right that’s made Mosaic grow and that people now are trying to copy — actually was making his church smaller. People were leaving because they didn’t like what he was doing. McManus is loud and forceful and not too politic, he skips the shirt and tie and wants a church that’s apostolic and prophetic — that has the zeal and the can’t-stop-it fire for God that the first-century apostles had. He thinks a pastor should be a revolutionary, reaching out to tell the world about Jesus, not a nurturer of church institutions and property and the people who are already there.

McManus is the author of An Unstoppable Force: Daring to Become the Church God had in Mind — the title was used as the theme of the Presbyterian Coalition’s national gathering, Oct. 6-8. And McManus, speaking to a crowd stuffed with Presbyterian pastors — mostly men, many well-established in their careers, perhaps more attuned to tradition than change — sometimes seemed like the surf pummeling the rocks on the Oregon coast.

He pointed, for example, to the building the group was meeting in — at Sunset church, a large and growing congregation in suburban Portland. In comparison with many sanctuaries, this was nontraditional and informal — no stained glass, no pews, just purple chairs set out in rows on what’s really a gym floor. Stackable chairs, McManus pointed out. “We get rid of pews and we get stacked chairs. But we set up stacked chairs exactly like pews,” in straight rows, as if “Jesus wanted stacked pews in lines.”

He talked about selling the church property as a witness to New Testament values, sending so many people off to do mission work there’s no one left to come to worship, worshiping in different places in different ways — the people stay where they already are, the pastor drives around.

The Western church is “more a movement of managers and administrators” than of visionaries and dreamers, McManus told the group. But churches need “to tell the truth to Christians” — to confront them, to shake them up, to make them a lot less comfortable, he said. “We tend to be incredibly sensitive to Christians and callous to non-Christians.”

The Christians show up with a consumer mentality. They say, “We’re coming to church because we want to be fed,” McManus said. But he tells them, “You need to exercise your faith. You’re fat … I want to make you hungry.” He said too many people come to church to get their only spiritual sustenance of the week, to stuff themselves with words about God — like a python who “gorges on Sunday and eats the pig the rest of the week.”

But that’s not enough, McManus contends. At Mosaic, people are pushed to go out into the community, to get involved, to be Christians in real life. One of the mantras he teaches is “The church is not here for us. We are here for the church, and the church is the world.”

McManus wants to change hearts, change attitudes, change Christians into people with a passion for the Bible and prayer and sharing God’s message with the world, change everything that’s being done just because that’s the way it’s always been done. One of the first things that got him into trouble at Mosaic was getting rid of what he calls the “welcome” — the time in the service when people greet one another. McManus saw that church members were climbing over guests, ignoring them to shake the hands of the people they already knew. Many congregations think they’re friendly, but they don’t seem that way to new folks, he said, explaining that to a visitor it’s like walking into a room where two people are making out, oblivious to anyone else. “It’s intimate, but you don’t feel like you should be there.”

The church members asked for a second chance, saying they could do better — and for a while they’d alternate between overzealous attention to guests to forgetting and ignoring them again. But in time, the ethos changed, McManus said — being welcoming shifted from being a rule to being a value, where members wouldn’t just point the way to new folks, but would walk them in and help them find their places, and “we never had to do the welcome again because we became a welcoming people.”

A Non-traditional Start

McManus is sensitive to those who didn’t grow up in the church, who aren’t familiar with how church is “supposed” to be, in part because that’s his own story. He was brought up in part by his grandparents, where he got roughly equal doses of Jesus from his Catholic grandmother, although “we never went to church and we never saw a Bible,” and his grandfather, who believed in reincarnation (resulting, McManus said, in something like, “Jesus can save you in every life.”)

In college, he tried all the flavors of Christianity, from Methodist to Pentecostal to Campus Crusade for Christ, asking everyone, “What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus Christ.” He believed in Jesus, but the churches mostly struck him as apathetic and lifeless.

He ended up doing work with the urban poor in Los Angeles, at a Southern Baptist congregation that was 60 years old, in debt and losing members, but had no real sense it was dying. But the process of making change was painful — in the early days, McManus said, the congregation lost 100 people in just a month.

To turn things around, the congregation made a commitment to mission — McManus said he spent some time pondering the question, “Is it possible to send so many people out that a church ceases to exist?” Mosaic sent 400 people on mission trips in a year, some of whom weren’t sure at all they were ready to go. “We even shut down all of our services one Sunday because there was no one left,” he said (adding that they forgot some visitors might not know and show up).

The age of the congregation dropped like the temperature in winter: from an average age of 50 to 24, with a high percentage of single folks. Mosaic now is 40 percent Asian and has members from more than 50 nationalities.

McManus also talked about how too great an emphasis on theology and learning — often a source of pride in the Presbyterian church — can stifle what people already know about God. He’s wild for the Bible. “Every time I poured my life into the Scriptures I met God,” McManus said, adding that “nothing took me there as quickly and powerfully as the word of God.”

But he also said, “We have entrusted the church more to theologians rather than revolutionaries,” and “the fact that people became educated wasn’t what caused the Reformation.” What caused the Reformation, McManus said, was that God started changing the church. Some ministers go straight from college to seminary to pastoring a church, with no other experience in life, he said. Some of them have no idea of how to be a catalyst, how to start a church or make it grow — but they are put into congregations that desperately need to change. The early church “had this irrepressible optimism about the future, about life, about this movement,” McManus said. But “we’ve been stuck in a lot of stupid stuff for a long time.”

He has met people who have had experiences of God that were not based in reason, and for whom those experiences brought them to know Jesus. He told of a rodeo rider who said he saw Jesus while riding a bull. The man was being bucked off, and Jesus plucked him up and put him back on the bull. “It’s so much easier to lead a guy to Christ if he’s had a vision of Christ on a bull,” McManus said.

It’s often not rational arguments that bring people to God, McManus said — it’s something they sense, they feel, they know in their bones. “So much of what we do through our apologetics is to help people understand better what they already know in their soul,” he said, adding that he longs for a church “that resonates with the voice of God, rather than tries to replace it … “I long for the day when the church is identified more for its mystery, for that which is unexplainable,” he said.