Light of the World, a City on A Hill
…thinking out loud about living missionally in the city of Sydney so that the city will come to know Jesus…Archive for churches
Reflections on Total Church
Here are some hits from the Total Church conference that I managed to capture:
Total Church is all about Christians living out their lives in community that is shaped in every way by the Gospel. (this was hammered throughout…made sense to me)
The gospel is the air we need to breath every single day – it’s not just something we pull out for evangelistic purposes. (I had already come to this conviction recently…the need to preach the gospel to believers not just un-believers)
The life of the believer is one of joyful repentance (Luther). It’s like we are continually saved, continually responding to the gospel. (Same as above)
We model to a watching world our covenantal life together. (It seems to me we don’t show the watching world anything much better/different than what they already experience…tough call)
Mission is the central purpose of the church in the world – central, not peripheral. (Pretty standard, missional thinking here)
More often than not the gospel and mission becomes the last bolt-on element to our lives.
So decision making goes: Job -> Location -> House -> School -> Church -> Gospel/Mission.
Instead it should be: Gospel/Mission -> Church -> Location/School/House/Job
(The above observations are so so true…The Crowded House guys really challenge their people to think very counterculturally on this)
When you use the word church, you are immediately mis-communicating as the word has so much baggage and misperception. (I have sympathy for this view, though I am in two minds about what to do about it)
The bedrock of gospel ministry - Long Term, Low Key, Relational (this was foundational…as an approach this seems so much more authentic than hit ‘em hard, confrontational evangelism)
Living with gospel intentionality in the everyday ordinary things of life. (gospel intentionality was a phrase that permeated the whole day. It very much underpinned the above ministry approach)
A commitment to building relationships and living out the gospel and talking about it as part of normal conversation. May require the introverted people to become relational. (Yep…fire up introverts)
I am reading the Total Church book at the moment which is helping to round out the concept. One key outtake, which others have also noted, is the concept of Evangelism in community, which really exhorts outside relationships being built in the context of the gospel community living out it’s life in all it’s dimensions. I really like the concept, but doing it in practice requires a huge shift in praxis, and it’s foreign to our fiercely individualistic culture.
Total Church Conference
I am taking the day off work next Tuesday to go along to the “Total Church” conference being pulled together by my friend Shane Rogerson.
I am really looking forward to hearing from Steve Timmis, and also hanging out with brothers and sisters from different backgrounds and situations. I’m hoping I’ll get to meet some people I only currently know digitally.
No doubt it will provide much food for thought (and blogging).
Can you handle the Truth?
I quite enjoy studying Biblical Doctrine. As I am not a bible college student, pastor or other “professional” this probably puts me in the category of eccentric weird guy.
I have particularly been meditating/reading/listening up on God’s sovereignty, particularly as it relates to salvation. This is a very weighty topic, but also very crucial IMHO.
Matt from Journey’s in between has inspired me to consider how a reformed framework/theology might shape our missiology, and I will post on this soon. In the meantime, however, I am wondering whether the teaching of doctrine has been somewhat neglected in our churches?
Mars Hill will start a 12-odd week series on Doctrinal basics this Sunday. This content will essentially replace their Gospel Class which they use for inducting people as members.
As evangelicals we are sometimes accused of being all about bible (in terms of knowledge anyway) and lacking in other areas like social justice. Now while this is in some ways true, I have become less convinced that we even have enough bible understanding.
No doubt experience will be different across the city. For me, I did the Moore College Introduction to the Bible correspondence course last year. Great course and I would recommend it. The thing is, I was embarrassed by the amount that I learnt form that course, particularly with respect to the Old Testament.
Perhaps I am isolated in my experience, but if not, should we be more intentional about teaching our people doctrine? Or do we think that the average punter can’t cope with it?
All Talk, No Action
Stephen Murray laments the fact that there is a lot of talk about church planting in his home country of South Africa, but not much actual church planting.
We do some here, but not a great deal.
Is this an area where we are also all talk, no action?
Are there other areas?
Israel & Greece 2009
The guys from Mars Hill Church are doing a tour of Israel and Greece in late 2009.
This would be awesome to join.
They are even planning on rockin’ out in Jerusalem, Mars Hill Style (which means Indie Rock).
What to do when Church Programs aren’t sucking your time
I posted a while ago here regarding what I saw as one of the downsides of an Attractional strategy, namely that the time taken in pursuing this approach meant less time for connecting with people and building relationships.
Well opinion was divided with some contending that even if some time was liberated, most people wouldn’t use it for connecting with people anyway, and in the meantime the churches program quality starts to suck.
This may well be true, but let me relate a story…
Some friends of mine are looking for a new church, and in the interim are not doing any “church ministry” i.e. no service involvement, no after hours meetings/sessions etc. My mate tells me that they now have so much extra time available which they are largely directing towards relationship building.
Now not everyone is as motivated as my friends (I love these guys, they are my model for building relationships), but surely we should think seriously about over-programming our people?
The Church with No Singing
…with the missional revolution & all that, we’ve discovered that many people are part of tribes/subcultures, many of which are not interested in church as we know it, and it may be that a Christian community needs to grow within the tribe - an indigenous church rather than inviting individuals from the tribe to a normal church. Such a tribe may be big into some style of music, in which case a church in that scene may feature that kind of music. Or remembering that most secular Aussies don’t sing much at all, maybe some of the churches to emerge next will not sing at all.
So commented Eric in a response to a recent post on music.
This is a really interesting thought. A church with no singing.
My church actually had no singing for four weeks in January as we went through the “Ideas that Changed the World” series. Honestly, I quite liked it (and just not because it gave me a break!).
My community group is looking at what it means to be the church, and the role of singing is one topic that’s already come up.
I’ll report back on the findings.
Music, Music and More Music
The Idol of Church Music
This article on the 9 Marks site (h/t Craig S) is a worthwhile read, and in some ways sums up concerns that have been galvanising in my own mind recently.
The author is being deliberately provocative in suggesting we get rid of all instruments in corporate singing, instead scaling back to pure acapella. He doesn’t actually mean it, but uses the statement to make his point.
His main point is that many Christians have effectively made an idol out of music, though few would recognise or admit this. Statements like “I can’t worship there” (in reference to a particular church), when boiled down to it relate to the style and quality of music. Equally troubling is when we need a certain singing experience to “Feel close to God”. If we do feel this way we need to start asking ourselves some very honest questions about how we are relating to God.
In moving churches from the big to the small I have, myself, had to really think hard about the role of music in church. Honestly if the music at my previous church was the standard by which I judged churches, I would not have decided to go to my current one. But that’s not what it’s all about is it? There are much more important factors like, for example, does the particular church community have a missional orientation to their community.
Its Church Jim, but not as we know it
Now I’m not a Trekky by any stretch of the imagination, but the quote came to mind as I reflected on Neil Cole’s most recent book, Organic Church.
I ploughed through the book over the recent Australia Day long weekend, mainly as the content compelled me to keep reading.
In a nutshell Cole, who has previously been a “normal” church pastor as well as a denominational church planting leader, puts forward the view that in this post-modern age, the most effective way of spreading the gospel is via what he calls organic church planting movements.
The book starts with a parallel to the Matrix (which seems like a popular thing to do with Christian writers). Cole suggests that the info that follows is a bit like ‘taking the red pill’, which, if you haven’t seen the movie, is something Neo (Keanu Reeves) does in order to be freed from the blissful ignorance of the matrix and exposed to the stunning truth of the real world.
I don’t know that Cole’s revelations are on the same scale as the revelations about the Matrix were to Neo (that his whole existence was a complete ruse), but in many ways I felt like my eyes were opened to some profound possibilities.
Like many, Cole is not a fan of “Attractional” church, and his alternative very much focuses on taking the gospel to the people. One of the key start points is frequenting places where people gather and and then building relationships. The places he mentions are cafe’s, coffee shops, sporting venues, parks & playgrounds - wherever people congregate. For Cole, the local coffee shop was his venue of choice (to which I say, amen) and he recounts the story of developing a faith community out of the caffeine-addicted regulars, which then went on to start another faith community in the next coffee shop.
After six years of this process of ‘injecting’ the gospel into these normal, everyday places and passing it on from place to place, Cole claims that there are over 600 functioning faith communities comprising over 10,000 people.
Now you may not be impressed by numbers (I keep seeing comments suggesting success is not measured by converts), but how ever you see it, there now seems to be 10,0000 more people who know Jesus thanks to the Holy Spirit and Neil Cole’s approach than before.
I see both strengths and areas for caution in Cole’s discipleship approach.
One key strength is reproducibility. This is an area the “Attractional” church model really struggles with as it requires a lot of energy, money, and talent to run this type of church to a standard that people are used to in the regular world. Anyone who has started a new church plant will know this. The “Organic” approach, on the other hand, requires very little resource, and in fact funnels a large part of the most available resource -time- into relationship building.
Another strength is that those groups of people who would never even consider the Christian Church as a place to meet their spiritual yearnings are within reach. By going to them, tribes like Tradies, Goths & Emo’s, Atheists and hardcore metal fans can all fall into the relationship circles of Christians and therefore the gospel.
The main areas for caution are that of leadership development and maintaining sound doctrine. In reading the book you very much get the sense that new believers become leaders of these new faith communities pretty quickly, raising obvious questions around spiritual maturity and wisdom. I am in two minds about this. On one hand, leadership of a church (regardless of size) in my tribe (Anglicans) is predicated on at least 4 years of full-time theological training. On the other hand, when Paul and Co were starting churches in the new testament they “appointed elders for them in every church, with prayer and fasting they committed them to the Lord” so says Acts 14:23 [ESV]. They didn’t send them off to bible college for 4 years before they were counted worthy to lead. If it was good enough for Paul, should it also be good enough for us?
On balance, if you could ensure sound doctrine underpinned each new faith community being developed, I reckon Cole’s approach has real merit.
