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What’s The Cause Church? A Q&A with jKonrad Hölé

What’s The Cause Church? A Q&A with jKonrad Hölé

Last updated on: September 1, 2015 at 4:05 pm by Deborah Arca

What’s The Cause Church? A Q&A with jKonrad Hölé 2015-09-01T16:05:21-06:00 Deborah Arca

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“Church is detrimental to the individual cause, because too much of current day church postures itself as the cause. A destination place mentality. People know the pew they fit, more than the cause they fit.” — jKonrad Hölé, author, The Cause Church

Q&A with jKonrad Hölé
Author, The Cause Church
Now Featured at the Patheos Book Club

What’s “The Cause Church?”

The Cause Church is a book I wrote about a prototype of thought and approach to modern day congregating church. Something that challenges the starting point of local congregations to re-think what they congregate for and what they spend the bulk of their tithe dollars attendance motive to exist as.

What inspired this book, at this time?

I had amassed much success in years of mainstream ministry, but I had changed very little. The cause and effect of my ministry was the prosperity of my ministry, not the worldview of prospering communities. I was so belief based and theology centric, I had no worldview of how cities could truly sustain themselves and individuals could reclaim their own lives. Now I do not care about what people believe, more than I want to know, “Can your ideas move society forward?” If you want to be a groupie-style church member, then what do I care how you see the Bible?

You talk about the importance of each of us discovering of our own ‘cause,’ and you back it up bibilically. Can you say more about that?

A cause is our mission for existence. The church has tried to make it a group exercise, rather than “my cause as a spiritual leader, is to connect you to your cause. ” When David asked the question in the midst of the Goliath conflict, “Is there not a cause?” he was simply asking, “is there not a reason that any of you exist, that is greater than the enemy that is really not your problem? Heaven or Hell is not a problem if a family cannot afford proper housing or a child cannot afford school lunch.

Why is the church often detrimental in helping us discover our cause?

Church is detrimental to the individual cause, because too much of current day church postures itself as the cause. A destination place mentality. People know the pew they fit, more than the cause they fit.

I mean, why do I need to tithe in order to have a staff of people to hold my hand while I discover God and life? Why do I need to be shown where I can volunteer at in the church when I don’t even know the problems I am to solve outside?

What is your own relationship with Church currently? Are you anti-church? Where is the place of the Church in your vision of discipleship?

No, I am not anti-church. I am anti sheep dependent on a shepherd. I lead a small congregating community each week. l also love speaking at other churches. But my only formula for discipleship is “vertical, rather than “horizontal. I push people to find God as real for them.Now they have truth as real to them, rather than told to them. I am not here to create the Sunday morning version of Facebook; I am here to empower people and at times offend them into finding where they make a community great, rather than where they make my church great.

How do we begin the search for our ‘cause’?

Start being the church of one. Then stop seeing the people you want to help thru the eyes of if you can convert them. Then go inside your heart and itemize the things that can grab your sight, and your compassion, your philanthropy and even your righteous anger at any moment of any day. These are the things you wake-up for. Those are the things you cannot leave earth without fulfilling.

There may be a lot of causes we’re drawn to along the way — is there just one ‘cause’ for each of us, and how will we know we when find it?

You will know your cause when you know what hooks your heart. This is how Nehemiah found his cause for re-building a wall. If you read the text, there was not some grandiose instruction from God for what to do; a group of people came and spoke to him and after they spoke Nehemiah could not stop crying and mourning for many days. The wall was not a need; it was the thing that hooked his heart.

If you could look into a crystal ball predict the future, what do you see for the future of Christianity?

Christianity is a dinosaur; a club for label wearing bubble-thinkers. And it will continue to lose appeal for everyday it assumes that because it can change the trend of how people worship in the bubble, that it has somehow changed the world. People are hungry for God for themselves…and to know that their lives made a difference. God for the whole tribe and whose tribe is more right, is dying and rightfully so.

What do you hope people most take away from this book?

The buck stops with you. Not your Pastor, or church or how long you have been a faithful member. If you know more about your religious beliefs than you do about the problems you were brought to this time and place to solve, then you serve a failed gospel. The art of congregating and solicitation cannot be our legacy. We cannot be the generation that knew more about how to build posh worship facilities than it did sustainable communities.

Read an excerpt from The Cause Church at the Patheos Book Club.

jKonrad Hölé (pronounced hu-la) is a spiritual leader/teacher, life architect, personal and corporate transition advisor, professional mediator, parenting coordinator and author. He holds both a Master’s and Doctorate in Theological Studies and Religious Theology from Logos University in Jacksonville Florida. He is an ongoing participant in the furthering education program of dispute resolution at The Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution at Pepperdine University in Malibu California as well as having completed California State accredited courses in Mediation, Divorce Mediation and Parenting Co-ordination from The Northern California Mediation Center in Marin County California. In addition, jKonrad is an active member of The American Counseling Association. Visit the author’s website at JKonrad.org

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