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I asked Pastor Dana Hanson what was the meaning in the word "LIFEhouse." He responded, "It has a lot of freshness. We're not saying, 'Hey, just join, write on a dotted line, be a member.' You're being invited to a way of life. And LIFEhouse is a cool name.
"There are probably about 500 people who are active. And there are probably about 1,000 people, who if you ask them, 'Who is your pastor?' would say, me. Because of the school, we do a lot of additional pastoral care. So I would say 500 active, with worship attendance probably at 350-400, on a good day.
"But you're not a member on paper here. Here in L.A., there's no advantage to have your name in a book. Most people are pretty involved."
As the Lead Pastor of LIFEhouse Church and Christian Schools, Pastor Dana brings his 27 years of lifestyle discipleship, and outreach experience to congregational life. He blogs regularly on the church's website, and has created a DVD series, “How To Be A Christian Without Being A Jerk!” One of the DVD topics talks about the concept of "A Person of Peace."
"I like the way Mike Breen--he's the guy who coined the phraseology--teaches receptivity. If somebody is seeking, what does scripture say? They'll find God. He'll show up. So I don't teach confrontational evangelism, I don't teach tract evangelism. There are plenty of people whom God is already drawing to you. I tell my folks, you don’t have to get into an argument with somebody about faith.
"My branding phrase for the people is, 'You share the compassion of Jesus with everyone; you share the gospel with those who are receptive.' That's the way we do life. We reach out to anyone and everyone, and we share the gospel with those who are receptive."
Pastor Dana was raised in Racine, Wisconsin, and the family business was the funeral industry; so he gained a unique perspective on pastors. "My dad, grandpa, great grandpa were funeral directors. Growing up. I knew the pastors in town. About 90,000 people in an industrial town in the Midwest. The pastors would hang around socially with my grandpa, because he was the funeral director--kinda like a peer--cause you don't hang out with people in your own church in those days. So I'd see these guys behind the scenes. Some of them were awesome, and some of them were some characters. And I'd think, I don't want to be that guy!
"I just laugh now, when I think of how many kids came up thinking about me, 'I'm not gonna be that guy!' I'm hoping that whatever they see in private life is the same they see in public life. That's what I'm living and teaching--they both match. It's important for people to see. You want your public and your private to match. I learned that from some really good mentors."
Pastor Dana came to the church in 1982 as the youth pastor, and faithfully served in this role before taking the mantle of Lead Pastor in 1996. His heart and focus still includes connecting with young people, from the way he dresses, to his style of ministry--rapid fire, fresh, and interactive.
"I don't dress up, I dress down because of the people I'm dealing with. I hang out more with mostly young people and all that. And they're not into suits and stuff. But I come legit."
His guilty pleasure is a thrift store called, "It's a Wrap," which he frequents with his daughter, Kristina. He admits that they are the shoppers of the family. "My daughter is my filter. So if there is anything that says, 'Dad you're trying to act young,' she tells me."
Pastor Dana Hanson and his wife Nancy have been married for 23 years, and along with 21-year-old Kristina, they have 18-year old twin boys, David and Gregory. The year 2010 holds some major milestones for the Hanson offspring: Kristina is in her third year at University of California Riverside, and plans to move into a masters program in mathematics, along with garnering a teaching credential. At the same time, Gregory and David will graduate from Reseda High School. Gregory plans to attend college, while David has his sights on college and the military, under an ROTC scholarship. Pastor Dana expounds on the lessons of raising his children to be disciples.
"It's just fun living your life with them, and they're just very important. They're basically- that's the way I teach around here too--that's your legacy, they're your most important disciples. Those are the ones you want to mentor the most. Those who know you the best, they love and respect you the most, and that's the way they'll go."
And it is this insight into daily life mentoring that has spearheaded a new model within this congregation. "Pastors will quite often disciple really awesome kids, but you don't disciple your own people--your own leaders, life-on-life. That's why we're involved in this whole process of leadership discipling. So it's really a whole new world opening up, to actually do things like Jesus did."
The 3-D Ministries discipleship-building model started in England, with Mike Breen and the staff of St. Thomas Church of Sheffield. St. Thomas’ discipleship training has been fully documented in two books by Mike Breen and Walt Kallestad: A Passionate Life, and The Passionate Church: The Art of Life-Changing Discipleship. The process was birthed and gestated in the Sheffield church, then the leaders felt led to move to the United States and spearhead an American-style model. LIFEhouse, and other churches, are the early "test adapters" of this model. "They're senior pastor and several lead families on purpose moved here to the States and set up kind of a consulting/mission practice. In the meantime, St. Thomas is flourishing even more, so they did a great job."
Pastor Dana has sought out leaders from within his congregation to form "huddles," life-on-life modeling and teaching. "I have taken eight leaders whom I focused on, and just praying, asking the Spirit to show who are the ones you want right now, who has the most potential for developing leaders themselves, and then just walking with them, mentoring them, investing in them. Then they will do this with six people, who will do the same with four. It's a three year process.
"The first year I just started, and it's weekly. You basically invest in their lives. A simple way of saying it is developing a discipleship culture. So the idea is to take what God has given you, the senior leader--you're the Rabbi, and what has God given the Rabbi. So you hang out with them, you go on vacation with them, that's what you do. For vacation with my wife this year, we went with one of the guys in my huddle and his wife. You live life with people so they get to see how you respond to situations in life, and then you can watch them, and it's really living that First Century church."
The model uses eight simple geometric shapes or "Life Shapes" to train people in biblical concepts, and to act as a memory aide: the Circle—Choosing to Learn from Life; the Semi Circle—Living in Rhythm with Life; the Triangle—Balancing the Relationships of Life; the Square—Defining the Priorities of Life; the Pentagon—Knowing Your Role in Life; the Hexagon—Praying As a Way of Life; the Heptagon—Practicing the Principles of a Vital Life; and the Octagon—Living a Mission-Minded Life. The thinking behind this model is that in an icon-driven society, young adults can latch onto these shapes and remember the implications and requirements of discipleship.
This pattern also instructs its participants in the "Person of Peace," and how this process works from God's perspective. "The congregation, as you well know, rises and falls on your leadership. With this model, you're all focused moving forward, and there isn't a lot of wide variation in terms of your teaching and understanding, and you teach in a way that can be duplicated by people."
These concepts are a natural progression of Pastor Dana's own style of ministry. He has been personally mentored by Dallas Willard, who has influenced Pastor Dana's own style. "Dallas Willard, his teaching and philosophy are what's behind what is being taught here. And that's probably the biggest influence. This 3-D ministry that we're involved in now is kind of like a delivery system--that's the best way of putting it. And Mike Breen's model comes right out of the same theology as Dallas' stuff, Kingdom theology, so that's why it was so attractive to me. And it has system and structure."
The 3-D focus is also suited to the congregation's makeup. "We have a large senior ministry and a large youth ministry. We focus on the youth ministry--that's the energy hub of us--that's the way the Spirit works. So we have a lot of young people and are developing them into young leaders. They have also provided a lot of leadership in the wider [denomination]; so our kids are always the ones who are leading."
This paradigm shift in building leaders and ministers has brought a sea change within the congregation. "The more we've been open to the Spirit, particularly myself first, but then others, the more that God has been sending folks from a variety of socio-economic and cultural backgrounds at the same time. We've never been 'a big wealthy white church,' but we were way whiter in the past. Now we're beginning to reflect more and more our community. So it's been interesting, and it hasn't necessarily been intentional. In the last year, two years, God has just been giving favor. But we are beginning to be more intentional, particularly in our neighborhood.
"It is also showing up in our visible leadership--that is strategic. The gal who has become my personal assistant and is part of our 3-D team is a Latina. So it's starting there. In the mid-sized communities we develop, there are probably half that will be non-white, in terms of leadership, someday."
Pastor Dana is actively involved with In The City for Good, and LIFEhouse is the host church where the pastors meet every Thursday morning. "It's really been helpful for me to be in the Valley and be in this prayer group, where we've been praying together now for nine years. It's a chance for me to really connect with folks from other traditions. That's how that melding took place, because I started meeting people and really connecting to how powerful God is working in the way that they did life."
He has also serves as a connection point. "What I brought, I'm a bridger, I'm a networker, I'm one that brings everyone together. I had a priest come into that group, praying every week, for about a half a year before he moved. But it was, a priest, and I can probably guarantee you that some of those guys were coming out of a tradition that said the Pope is the antichrist. Now, they're praying and sharing bread. That's a Lutheran in a classic sense; we're kind of good at bringing people together."
In building his congregation as disciples and leaders, he has moved away from the label of "Lutheran." "Well, we come out of the American Lutheran Church (ALC) but now we're connected to the denomination through the ELCA. It's really for the sake of mission-we don't really have a lot to do with other stuff. We're more connected to these networks that are more interdenominational. For example, 3-D community comes out of the Anglican-Baptist tradition."
For the future of the church, the 3-D community will be the nexus for growth. "We'll continue to expand, but it's going to be kind of fun, because it's fuzzy in terms of when you get into these mid-size communities, your influence is going to be in the neighborhood. We have a real strong connection to the [Northridge] Hospital across the street and we provide a good chunk of their spiritual care. Over half of their calls now are probably being done by our people. We have nineteen ministers over there who do calling and healing prayer, and we have people who are in the ER. That's expanding, that's really exciting. Because you're connecting with people who are going through there."
But in terms of theology, the churches roots are still old-school Lutheran. "We're still connected to the Lutheran denomination, we're still Lutheran in tradition, so that has not changed. It was one of those things that, if anyone knew what Lutheran meant, no one knew what it meant. Most people thought it had something to do with Martin Luther King Jr. We come out of a mainline tradition with a heavy emphasis on serving the poor and those in need, and peace and justice issues. At the same time, strongly evangelical, the Bible is the Word of God, infallible, and also having a strong emphasis on the ministry of the Holy Spirit, promoting people to be able to live their lives out in their natural wiring and through their five-fold ministry roles.
"You combine all of that and, this is not strategic, this is just who I am. It makes for the best mix for the future and the present right now. When you think of that, the strengths of all three of those emphases, how strong it is when you have them combined. So you're not living on the fringes. Now, you're on the edge, but not the fringe."
Pastor Dana gained a new perspective on ministry in 2001. He says he had "a born-again experience" where he opened himself to the Holy Spirit. "In the last couple of years he's really enlarged me, so it's been exciting. I have to be less, so he can be more. You're a human being; you want to shine. But the more I go along, the more I'm trying to be behind the scenes and having other people up front.
"It's also the power thing. The more power God shows, the more I realize how little I really have. And how it's about His ways not mine. Probably about less than 10 years ago, I thought it was on my charisma, my personality, my intellect, and then it was, 'Okay, Holy Spirit, you wanna come along?'
"But in the last ten years, in the last three years in particular, the more I see, the more I go, You're not all that. But He is. I have had more 'Holy Spirit Wham!' in the last few years than I've had in the 20 plus years of ministry."
For more info:
About LIFEhouse Church, visit their website or visit Pastor Dana’s blog.
About St. Thomas of Sheffield/Discipleship Model, visit the 3-D website or see the Vanguard Church's writeup.
About In the City for Good, visit their website.
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