Challenging Times

‘A vision for church growth must be a vision for church planting.’

This is what Steve Timmis and Tim Chester say in ‘The Gospel Centred Church,’ and I’m increasingly convinced that they’re right.

This is a workbook or study course, rather than a book you would sit and read. You could certainly work through it on your own, but it would be far more useful for the whole church to go through it together. (A series of sermons and discussions? Go through it in home groups?)

It’s divided into three main sections (The priority of mission, the priority of people, and the priority of community), and eighteen chapters. So you could take eighteen weeks to go through it with a group. This might feel like a long time, in some groups. (Yes, I know, in some groups, eighteen weeks would feel like a very long time…) However, the chapters are quite short, so you could probably take two chapters per week, and cover the whole book in about nine weeks.

Timmis and Chester say a lot of thought-provoking things. How about:

The problem is the gap between our rhetoric and the reality of our practice.

Or

Most people are no more likely to enter a church than you or I are to go into a betting shop.

Or

Church is where we feel safe and comfortable. Church is where non-Christians feel embarrassed and awkward.

And one I found particularly challenging:

Too often our desire is to be known as a church with good teaching. But good teaching, however engaging and orthodox, counts for nothing. What counts is good Bible learning and good Bible action.

Ultimately, Timmis and Chester want to encourage us to see Church planting as a positive way forward which is much nearer at hand than we may assume:

Church planting creates a simplicity that prevents a maintenance mentality – there are no expensive buildings to maintain or complex programmes to run.

Go here for a longer review.

‘A failure to think biblically about the church will stifle church planting.’

I’ve just finished reading this. It’s a great book. I don’t recommend you to read it – read on, and you’ll see why.

This book challenges many of our dearly held assumptions about church. It’s written to encourage church leaders, and individual Christians, to take church-planting more seriously as an option.

Big churches often wait to plant churches until they can send out a large congregation, equipped with a full programme of activities, paid staff, and a building programme.

Just how much of this is really needed? According to Steve Timmis and his co-authors, not much at all. Bible churches were small household-centred groups. They grew by multiplying groups rather than by adding individuals.

Timmis quotes from a massive research project by Christian Schwarz, which found that churches of fewer than a hundred people grow twice as fast, proportionately, as churches of one to two hundred. Churches of three to four hundred grow more slowly than churches of fewer than one hundred. Not just proportionately more slowly, but absolutely more slowly.

Much of our thinking about church needs to be challenged. Are you prepared to have everything you think about the church turned upside down? If not, I don’t recommend that you read this book.

Go here to find out more.

This really is another ‘must read’ book. In the introduction, Leonard Sweet says:

There are some books good enough to read to the end. There are only a few books good enough to read to the end of time. The Forgotten Ways is one of them.’

He is right. In AD 100, there were twenty five thousand Christians in the world. By 310 (the time of the emperor Constantine) there were twenty million. How did they do it? How did they go from being a small and marginal movement to being the most significant religious force in the Roman empire?

Drawing on the early church, the Chinese church in our own times, and on his own experience as a church-planter, Alan Hirsch builds a simple model of the key themes of missional churches – themes that we so often seem to have forgotten today.

Go here to read more.

I’m studying part time for a D.Min, through Spurgeon’s College. On Friday, I had the chance to sit in a really fascinating seminar by John Drane, on ‘Is the emerging Church real Church?’

One of the things John Drane talked about is the way that we assume God only starts to work in someone’s life when they come into a church meeting, or come in contact with Christians. But the truth is that God is out there, often at work in people’s lives long before they come anywhere near us.

John Drane gave a number of illustrations of people looking for spiritual reality. This front page from The Independent (16th May 2006) was one example.

Titled ‘No News Today,’ the cover was designed by Damien Hirst. The subtitle says, ‘Just 6,500 Africans died today from a preventable/treatable disease.’

The graphics that make up the design are in the shape of a cross, and at the top centre, there’s a Bible reference, Genesis 1:27. This is the verse about humanity being made in God’s image. Christian symbols within the design include a dove of peace, and a pair of praying hands.

It’s a sign of people’s spiritual searching. It’s a starting point for sharing the Good News of Jesus (just like the altar to the unknown god was in Athens).

So what do we do with it?

I spent last evening with a terrific group of people, talking about the future of the Church in this country.

It’s a question that’s been bothering me recently: where will the Church be in ten years’ time? (Not where it is now, that’s for sure.) Where should it be in ten years’ time? And what do we need to do now to get there? So much Christian leadership thinking seems to be built on the assumption that the future will be just like the past – ‘more of the same,’ and that we can handle it by doing the same kinds of things we are doing now, but striving to do them better.

So last evening, we talked about all kinds of questions, including what you would do to build a biblical Church, if you had a blank sheet of paper.

But… an interesting sidelight. We all knew that the Church is the people, not the building. And yet, we found ourselves again and again drifting into talking about ‘going to Church,’ or talking about ‘the church’ when we meant the building. Even when we were consciously trying to avoid talking like this, it just kept popping out.

Now, it’s easy to brush this off by saying ‘well, we all know what we mean.’ But I’m not so sure. The words we use have a powerful ability to shape how we think. If we stopped assuming that ‘we all know what we mean,’ if we were a bit more careful how we say things, I wonder whether this would be a first step towards changing the way we think.

Watch your words. They matter.

Reading this book could seriously change the way you think about church – and life. Frost starts by saying:

‘This book is written for those Christians who find themselves falling into the cracks between contemporary secular Western culture and a quaint, old-fashioned church culture of respectability and conservatism.’

Christendom is over, and we need to get over it. Followers of Christ need to learn again what it means to live as exiles in a culture that is not sympathetic to our faith. Being exiles is a dangerous situation, and it needs dangerous responses. Frost says:

Exiles are driven back to their most dangerous memories, their recollections of the promises made by Jesus and his daring agenda for human society. Exiles are prepared to to practice a set of dangerous promises, promises that point to the kingdom and are caught up with the prevailing values of the empire. Exiles will mock the folly of that empire by offering a dangerous critique of a society wracked by greed, lust, selfishness, and inequality. And finally, exiles will sing a repertoire of dangerous songs that speak of an unexpected newness of life.

This is a provocative book, which will probably challenge and infuriate you equally. However, whether you shout ‘amen,’ or hurl it at the wall, it will get you thinking about what it really means to follow Jesus Christ as an exile in today’s post-Christian world. And that has to be good.
Go here to read more…

Recently, I’ve been very frustrated by a particular kind of response I’ve had when talking about the need for the Church to become more missional. This kind of response is so common, and has such clearly defined characteristics, that it’s worth an acronym of its own. So I’ve given it the acronym MACE – the Meaningless Anecdotal Counter Example. (It’s no coincidence that a mace is something you hit people with.)

Here’s how it goes:

You mention a particular uncomfortable piece of information in support of what you are saying – a fact, a statistic. For example, ‘church attendance in the UK fell by a million people between 1989 and 1998.’ (This is a fact; it was discovered by Christian Research.)

Then the MACE kicks in with ‘well, we’ve seen half a dozen people come to faith in our church in the last few months.’

The force of this is that the anecdotal evidence looks like it contradicts the uncomfortable information. It sounds like it contradicts it. For all I know, it even smells like it contradicts it.

But it doesn’t.

It’s a Meaningless Anecdotal Counter Example.

The fact that some individuals have come to faith in no way counters the overall reality that Church attendance in the UK is nose-diving.

Here’s another example:

The uncomfortable information: small churches grow faster than big churches. This is also a fact, discovered by Christian Schwarz, in a massive survey of churches across Europe. The ideal size for a church to grow is fifty people. Below that, churches are too small to grow. Above that, they grow proportionately more slowly.

I’ve mentioned this fact in discussions about church planting, only to have it met with blank disbelief. ‘I don’t believe that.’ Then comes the Meaningless Anecdotal Counter Example: ‘XXXX is a church of six hundred people, and they’re growing fast.’

Well yes. So what? How does that disprove my point? So you can point to one or two churches of six hundred people that are growing. It is still a MACE. It would only be a genuine counter-example if you could somehow show that the same churches wouldn’t be growing even faster if they split into 12 congregations of fifty each.

OK, you get my point.

Here’s one final example:

The uncomfortable fact: ‘our church is weak on genuine community.’

The MACE response: ‘Well, when so-and-so was taken seriously ill, there was a massive outpouring of support and love and prayer for them.’

Well yes, there was. Thank God for it. But (excuse me being so blunt) so what? How does that prove that we aren’t weak on genuine community? What about the ten or twenty or two hundred other people who were taken ill and nobody knew (or cared)?

My point is that MACEs don’t disprove the uncomfortable facts. They appear to do so, but in reality they are meaningless as counter examples.

So why do people use them?

Because the facts are often uncomfortable, and it is easier to diss them than to think them all the way through.

Obvious really, isn’t it?

I must think of a use for this strategy….

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- Revd Dr. John Balchin, former minister of Purley Baptist Church and Above Bar Church Southampton

Encountering people of other faiths is a hot issue in today’s world: religious extremism is growing around the world. At the same time, hostility towards people of all faiths is increasing, and followers of Christ are often accused of being intolerant and bigoted. How can we handle the challenges presented by other faiths and by growing intolerance?

This new course from Focus will help you and your home group, cell group, or Adult Sunday School class to think through the issues involved in a thoroughly biblical way.
Go here to find out more