One of the most educational days I ever spent was in Bakersfield, California, with a man named Bill Bolthouse. A deeply committed Christian originally from Michigan, Bill developed and refined the harvesting of raw carrots into those beautiful little rounded carrots you frequently see on a vegetable tray with cauliflower, broccoli, and some ranch-dressing dip. By the time I met Bill, his company, Bolthouse Farms, was in grocery stores everywhere, and he was one of the largest producers of carrot products in America.
As we toured their massive production facility, we went first to the place where the carrots were washed, peeled, and cut into sections by the truckload. While the scale and efficiency of the operation blew my mind, what really impacted me were the patented processes they had developed for the by-products of those little carrots. They made various items from the shavings, the peel, the end that was too small to use—nothing was allowed to go to waste. Juices, yogurts, breads, and many other foods all from the by-product of making those little carrots you pop in your mouth at a party.
I think the church of Jesus Christ in most locations is confused about what is primary and what is by-product. Getting product/by-product reversed puts Vertical Church and all it means upside down in the ditch, so please allow me to clarify.
A by-product is only derivative. A by-product is generated indirectly through a primary process toward an outcome of greater value. A by-product of harvesting chickens is the feathers, which have less value than the chicken. When sugar is refined, the by-product is molasses, useful in certain instances, but fractionally so compared to the sugar. A by-product of crude-oil refinement is mineral oil, which is worthless compared to the primary outcome upon which we all depend, namely gasoline.
The problem in the church today is that we treat God’s glory as a by-product…
The problem in the church today is that we treat God’s glory as a by-product and the missional activities of the church as the primary thing—when the opposite is what Scripture demands. We don’t proclaim the gospel and feed the poor and shepherd the flock in hopes that God’s glory will be the by-product of those activities. We seek the revealing of the glory of God through the methods He prescribes so that His glory is revealed in the church. When that happens, the lost are converted, the poor are fed, the saints live in unity, and much more, all as by-products of God’s manifest presence in the church. This is not a nuance or semantics.
In horizontal church, missional activities are pursued with a vague hope of God’s glory being a potential by-product. People are commissioned with no fuel to accomplish their activities and no reasonable expectation of success in a venture God never intended them to accomplish alone.
In Vertical Church, we pursue the manifest glory of God as our goal, believing that His revealing brings about the missional by-products. Getting the sequence wrong and forgetting what is the primary and what is the by-product gets the church to where it is today: consumed with influence, constantly diminishing revealed truth in the name of improving Jesus’ PR, and substituting attention-getting entertainment that fills seats for what gets us out of our seats and on our faces.
It’s these horizontal methods that substitute for glory, tricking us into believing God is at work when we are actually assuring His absence through methods that offend His holiness. Where such offense is avoided but God is not sought faithfully we often substitute rote conformity to the code of Scripture without seeking the God revealed in Scripture to reveal Himself.
God’s glory must again be primary in the church and no longer assumed as a by-product of outreach or orthodoxy.
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