The danger of bringing them in too soon

This chapter asks you to say something about your own congregation that no outsider has the right to say about it.

Not that it is wicked. Not that it is failing. Something quieter and harder: that there may be a season in which your Sunday gathering is not yet the safest place for an eight-month-old disciple who has just started obeying everything he reads.

Sleepy is not the same as bad

Most congregations are full of people who have grown complacent — believers who have come to treat obedience to Jesus’ commands as optional, or as something for the especially spiritual, and who would be genuinely surprised to hear it put that way.

That did not happen through rebellion. It happened because they were faithfully taught that attendance was the scorecard, and they believed it, and they kept attending for thirty years. It is obedience to the wrong instructions, held with a whole heart.

But whatever its cause, it has an effect, and the effect is the problem: complacency is contagious.

Why the young group loses

Put a new group into an old culture and the old culture wins. Not through argument — through atmosphere.

A group of people who started following Jesus last year is the most impressionable thing in your town. They have no settled expectations yet. They are still learning what normal looks like. Drop them into a room where nobody is obeying anything in particular, nobody has told a neighbour in years, and nobody expects to multiply, and they will learn that room faster than the room learns from them. Within a year the obedience question has stopped being asked and nobody can point to when it stopped.

But when the sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root, it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, so it yielded no crop. — Mark 4:6–7 (OTB)

Neither seed in that pair was a bad seed. One had no root yet; the other was put down where something was already growing. Both were placed somewhere before they were strong enough for what was already there.

A quarantine of a culture, not of people

This is the sentence to hold onto, and it is the sentence that keeps this chapter from becoming something ugly.

Nobody is being kept out. Nothing here is a gate in front of a person. Say the distinction out loud, because it is easy to hear wrong and almost impossible to repair once someone has heard it wrong:

The individual is always welcome. What we decline to do is fold a whole young group into an older culture before its own DNA can hold.

If a person from one of those groups wants to be at your gathering, they are welcome, and you go and sit with them. The caution is about a strategy of wholesale absorption, and it is a decision you make on your side — not a rule you announce to them.

Faith plus desire, one person at a time

So what is the actual marker? Two things, assessed per person rather than per group.

Real faith — not interest, not attendance, not a good Thursday. And their own desire — they want it, and nobody talked them into wanting it.

When both are true of a person, the connection is ripe and you should welcome them wholeheartedly. When they are not, the answer is not prohibition; it is patience, and it is more discipling.

Anything earlier is transplanting a seedling to please the gardener.

A leader changing his own congregation from the inside meets this same question from the other direction — see Protect the new groups from your own church in From Sleepy to Disciple-Making.