The Movement Markers of Jesus

I bake my own bread because of a guy named Duke. I moved away from the greater Seattle area in the late 1990s when an up-and-coming restaurant was on a “best clam chowder in Seattle” winning streak. Even if it was just marketing, I loved the chowder from Duke’s. The next best item on the menu next to the chowder, was the complimentary sourdough bread. I haven’t visited Seattle often through the years, but on my last trip to Seattle, I made sure to grab a bowl of chowder and a loaf of sourdough from Duke’s. The chowder was amazing, but the wafting aroma of sourdough bread rekindled my memories and my love for baking bread.

The ingredient list for sourdough bread is simple: flour, water, starter, and salt. The process of making sourdough bread is also simple, time-consuming, but simple. Making the dough, kneading, the bulk rise, proofing the loaves, and baking, producing loaves for the week (if they survive the sampling). Straight forward and simple, unless you forget an ingredient. Forget? While there are only four ingredients, it is possible to forget one—the salt. The salt doesn’t go in with the flour, water, and starter. Depending on your method of choice, salt might be added as long as sixty minutes later to aid in the proper development of the dough. Nothing is more disheartening than finding your premeasured salt misplaced behind a towel as you pull out over-risen floppy loaves from the oven. The right ingredients can distinguish between amazing Facebook-worthy loaves and deflated lumps.  

The right ingredients are essential for more than baking bread. The right ingredients are also essential for launching and maintaining a movement. When Jesus revealed the blueprints for his church theologically, he described it using three essential ingredients: divine knowledge, community, and mission. In his 2005 release Organic Church, Neil Cole identifies the essential ingredients for a church as needing divine truth, nurturing relationships, and apostolic mission. At the same time, there is more that goes into the ingredients of a local church, each of the ingredients—a church’s biblical identity, purpose, and ability to engage in church multiplication—when leading a healthy church.

In 2023, I introduced an evidence-based model combining biblical truth and the sociological study of Western evangelical churches called Missio-Ecclesia. Missio-ecclesia connects three elements needed for the church as a movement: connection with God and His mission, community and missional encouragement, and missional living. Each ingredient is necessary, and the ingredients affect each other. The paths of theology, church studies, and sociology lead to the same address. The essential elements of a healthy and active church are connected, and they also describe the church as a movement.

The movement markers that Jesus instilled into the church are simple, like making a loaf of sourdough bread. Connection with God and mission, a community that encourages one another toward mobilization, and living on mission are the essential movement markers of the Christian church. Yet, just because they are simple, it doesn’t mean we can forget one ingredient or put in too much of another. We need a balanced approach to church that helps people grow in their identity in Christ and commitment to God’s mission, connect with a community of believers that holds one another accountable to living on mission with God, and that sends (empowers and releases) people to live on mission. A recipe balanced toward movement may provide a path for church leadership, Christian engagement, and church revitalization. The church was not designed with movement markers to be a movement that changes people and changes the world.

How is your identity in Christ connected to how you live your life?

Have you explored how God calls you to live on His mission with Him?

From Chapter 3 of Revive: Leading Change—Igniting Movement by Jim Strecker