Transforming Grace

One obvious criticism of McGavran’s homogenous church growth theory is that it merely perpetuates existing social segregation and denies the biblical imperatives for the integration of Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free through faith in Christ crucified. McGavran counters these accusations with the following arguments:

• Class and racial segregation continue in spite of Christian faith, not because of it. The Christian in whose heart Christ dwells inclines toward brotherhood as water runs down a valley.
• The creation of narrow Churches, selfishly centred on the salvation of their own kith & kin only, is never the goal.
• Jews and Gentiles - or other classes and races who scorn and hate one another - must be discipled before they can be made really one.

Secular sociologists Michael Emerson and Christian Smith take a very negative view of homogenous congregations with a particular emphasis on black and white churches in the USA. They state that

two important ways that groups provide meaning and belonging are by establishing group boundaries and social solidarity. A group is a group, in part, by virtue of its difference from other groups; put another way, by virtue of its internal similarity.

They argue that homogenous churches thrive because

in the process of competing, of developing niches and assuring internal strength, congregations come to be made up of highly similar people.

Congregations with a broad and inclusive policy fail because lack of homogeneity causes

loss of membership, commitment and group solidarity.

If McGavran is right, however, churches which are established to reach a homogenous people group will not stay homogenous for long, because the gospel of Christ crucified will define the group boundary for church membership and create social solidarity between disparate people groups.

Amanda and I were initially the only non-Tamil members of a 60 year-old Tamil church in Singapore. The church was established during the second world war to reach Tamil speaking Singaporeans with the gospel. We loved our brothers and sisters there and are still in contact with some. We noticed over time that Christian converts and expatriate Tamils who joined the church were not discipled to become one with Chinese Singaporean Christians, as McGavran believes they ought to be. The reason for this was the church depended on remaining racially homogenous in order to attract new Tamil members. The result of homogenisation, though it may never have been stated or envisaged at the outset, was a culturally isolated church where the teaching failed to challenge racial prejudice and immaturity amoungst members was perpetuated.

Sadly, where homogenous churches are planted, they can quickly establish group boundaries and social solidarity based on their homogeneity, which is idolatry. They reject the teaching of the bible in order to remain homogenous and so deny the gospel of Christ crucified for sin both to church members and to the watching world.

You may never have heard of Donald McGavran but if you look at the churches you know you may see his theory of church growth at work. McGavran was a third generation missionary kid who was brought up in India where he observed that men like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic or class barriers. This insight led McGavran to develop a theory of culturally aware mission practices and theories known as the homogenous church growth principle (HCGP). Eddie Gibbs summarises that McGavran developed a ‘people-group’ approach to evangelism, not as a device for segmenting the market to invite people like us but as a strategy for penetrating the mission fields of the world. He was interested in meeting people on their own turf and identifying with the seeker. The Homogeneous Church Growth movement (HCGM) has been hugely influential in the way we view mission in all areas of the world, including the urban west.

McGavran’s main claim is that people refuse Christ not for religious reasons, not because they love their sins, but precisely because they love their brethren…[the] main problem is how to present Christ so that men can truly follow Him without traitorously leaving their kindred. From this observation, McGavran developed a church growth model that encourages the establishment of churches within homogenous units, churches which are designed to exploit existing social networks and stratification. McGavran notes that like reaches like and this is most effective when people are not required to leave their homogeneous unit and join other people. He notes that people prefer to join churches whose members look, talk and act like themselves. It is this “people consciousness”, according to McGavran, which greatly influences when, how and to what extent the gospel will flow through that segment of social order. Thus, when allocating mission resources, homogeneous units are labelled by the HCGM as “resistant” or “receptive” to the gospel and such units may coexist in one geographical area. One great fallacy, according to McGavran, is that people suppose that the church grows in a geographical area, when as a matter of fact it always grows in people themselves - usually a homogeneous unit of society.

The positive marks of the HCGM include rapid growth of first generation churches. This growth marks them out as distinctive and makes their method attractive to mission minded church leaders. I am going to blog on the positive implications of McGavran’s work for mission but show that homogenous churches that form within multicultural societies deny, by their very existence, that salvation is by grace through faith in Christ alone and lead long term to Christian immaturity.

A church in a middle class neighbourhood is planning a church plant. There are two options. To plant in another middle class area or in a hard inner city area. The two areas border each other. The church wants to take the gospel to the people of both areas. Where should it plant?

Assuming that there are suitable facilities and meeting places in both areas, some might say, plant in the wealthier area. People there can resource the work, there will be an abundance of educated, profesional people to run various ministries and from a position of strength the church can reach out to the neighbouring harder area.

This strategy will not work. Between every middle class and inner city area there is a fully functioning semi-permeable membrane and osmosis works in only one direction. Educated, middle class Christians of all maturities will cross the culture gap and join a church in an inner city area, presuming there is no church in their neighbourhood, but reverse osmosis rarely or never occurs for all sort of complex social reasons.

If we are serious about reaching inner cities, we have to go there. Not just to meet as a church but to live. We have noticed this process at work at St Luke’s. Mobile and educated people, both mature and young in their faith, have been willing to drive to church from where they live and some have even thought about living in Blakenhall. If we met in the next door middle class area, the process would not work in reverse and the church would inevitably become a comfortable middle class gathering.

Is inner city ministry as hard and scary as we might led to believe by the media? I’ve been in Blakenhall, Wolverhampton for two and a half years. This area of the city recently received a European development grant for £55 million and now the ABCD community redevelopment project is almost complete. Old high rise flats have been pulled down, the tatty pavements have been block paved, the parks are being landscaped, shop fronts restored.

There have been sad and scary stories of Blakenhall in the national media in recent years including a mother who has twice been sent to jail because of her son’s truancy; three young Asian men who drowned whilst on holiday in the Lake District; a gun battle in broad daylight on a shopping street this side of the city centre and perhaps most notorious of all, the machete attack on our church school’s nursery in 1997 which made Lisa Potts a national heroine.

I could tell you the stories of the drug den we used to pass on the way to school, of the red light district less than half a mile from our front door, of the funeral I conducted where one member of the family was handcuffed to his prison warden, but then I would be as guilty as the national press of sensationalising the unusual.

This article by Ed Jones in the Guardian about life in Salford typifies media attitudes toward our inner cities. I encourage you to read it in full. The original article was titled ‘Get them f***ing Polish out of your house or I’ll burn it down’

Youths smash the windows at the back of the house with stones and rocks. I put bars over the upstairs windows. A huge firework is thrown into the house through the back door. One of my lodgers is pelted with eggs on her way up the street and, once she goes inside, our front door becomes the target. My new car is vandalised. The drainpipes are pulled off the house. The porch is covered in graffiti, as are the windows. “Ed sucks Polish dick” is among the gambits. There’s always some bother.

This reportage would make Damien from Drop the Dead Donkey proud. The damaging effect of such “news” is the skew it puts on our nation’s picture of the inner city. This lopsided view stops many university educated middle-class ministers venturing beyond what is familiar and comfortable. I know, because it’s partly how I felt two years ago.

Mark Greer, an Oasis minister, had his letter Salford’s not all grim published in the Guardian in response to Ed Jones’ article.

Our neighbours have been welcoming and we have had no trouble. I have lived in upper-middle-class suburbs of Leeds and London and this tough working-class area has more of a community spirit.

I am glad for Mark’s response. It’s great that the Guardian printed it. I echo this view. There is a healthy community spirit here in Blakenhall.

One young lady who came to our “Cake and Chat” drop-in on a Tuesday morning commented on the work of ABCD. She said “it is not pavements that need regenerating, it’s people.” The scary question is this: with middle-class flight from the inner cities, who will tell the wondrous story of the Christ who died for sin and who brings true regeneration?

The table bellow lists 25 of the benefits of faith union with Christ. These benefits are what Christ won for his people on the cross and are what make bad trees into good trees. The gospel produces good trees which in turn produce good works, so the Christian believer must focus on the good news, the benefits of faith union with Christ, if good works are to follow. Thomas Watson gives advice on how to dwell on the benefits of the cross.

Thomas Watson writes in his exposition of the Beatitudes

There are many truths swim in the brain, which do not sink into the heart, and those do us no good. Chew the cud. Let a Christian think seriously with himself, there is a blessedness feasible and I am capable of enjoying it, if I do not lay bars in the way and block up my own happiness. Though I see within nothing but guilt, and without nothing but curses, yet there is a blessedness to be had, and to be had for me too in the use of means.

I have previously posted on the distinction between the gospel and law where the gospel defines our status before God.

I use the following table of truths to meditate on my status. As I meditate I find my affections and desires correspondingly increase. Jesus said ‘If you love me, you will obey what I command’ (John 14v15). Focusing on the nature of the gift of grace increases our love for the giver and so our desire to obey what he commands. What is the gift of grace? It is all the benefits secured by Christ on the cross for his people. Some of these benefits are listed in the table below.

Give it a go. Take one gospel truth at a time and take your time. Don’t put bars in the way and block up your own happiness. The proof is in chewing the cud. Do it frequently.
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Mike Ovey, principal of Oak Hill College, wrote in a recent letter to college graduates:

I thank God for what I see being achieved in churches up and down the land, but feel it laid on my heart that, with honourable exceptions, we minister the Gospel to a socially-restricted fraction of our nation [professional suburban England].

Few would disagree with him. I happen, by God’s sovereign will and so not entirely my own initiative, to be serving in a largely non-professional, non-suburban part of England. St Luke’s church were I am curate is situated in a multi-cultural inner city area of Wolverhampton where over half the population is South Asian. There is a strong West Indian community. The white population comprises largely of the lower socio-economic groups. There is now also a large number of African and Polish expatriates, with smatterings of over 70 other ethnic groups. I love it here. I love the people I share gospel fellowship with and those whom I live beside and minister to.

So, I’m going to blog about my experience in the hope that what I say might inspire other ministers to leave the comfort and security of middle-class suburbia and get on with gospel work in different socio-ethnic locations.

As well as some of the observations I’ve made whilst I’ve been here and when living oversees in the Far East, I’ve got stuff to write about the homogeneous church growth principle (HCGP). The HCGP states that like reaches like with the gospel and this might be what underlies our mono-cultural mission shaped churches.

To keep this subject within the boundaries of my blog, transforming grace, I’ll say at the outset that I believe homogeneous churches in a multicultural society deny, by their very existence, that salvation is by grace alone. More on that to follow.

Ever wonder why, if the wages of sin is death and Christ died for our sin why Christians still die? Understanding what happened at the fall helps shed some light. God said to Adam, “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (Gen 2:17).

When Adam and Eve ate from that tree he did not die. Instead, they were excluded from God’s life sustaining presence and so they grew old and Adam died naturally at 930 years of age (Gen 5:5).

Adam’s natural death in old age is to be distinguished from God’s threat of death. The threat of death for disobedience was to be judicial and by summary execution as Hamilton notes in his study of the Hebrew term translated “die” in Genesis 2:17:

all that môt tāmût clearly conveys is the announcement of death sentence by divine or royal decree. (Hamilton, The book of Genesis, NICOT, 1987)

The natural death of Adam and Eve was not judicial in this sense. Instead, God graciously granted them a stay of execution, he postponed their sentence. The natural or mortal death of human beings is not the judgement threatened in Gen 2:17. Rather, being shut out of God’s life giving presence was a consequence of sin. God effectively said to Adam and Eve “you cannot remain in my presence as sinners or I will consume you in my holiness and purity.”

The judicial death promised by God is the second death of Revelation 20:14-15. All mortal bodies will be raised, face judgement and must be executed by royal decree (Gen 2:17). God never lies. The sentence pronounced in Eden is not commuted but postponed. Fallen human beings can only escape this second death by faith union with Christ in his substitutionary judicial execution. His death was both natural and judicial. Christians should not, therefore, fear natural death as it is only falling asleep (1 Thess 4:14-15) which is a consequence of being shut out of God’s presence because of sin.

The traditional reformed covenant of works treats the two trees in the midst of the garden as sacraments but unequally. Broadly speaking, Calvinist sacramental theology is applied to the prohibited tree but a Zwinglian understanding of sacraments is applied to the tree of life.

Calvin’s definition of a sacrament integrates a word of promise with a sacrament so that one never has

a sacrament without an antecedent promise, the sacrament being added as a kind of appendix, with the view of confirming and sealing the promise, and giving a better attestation, or rather, in a manner, confirming it [Institutes Book 4 Ch14].

It is in this way that God faithfully and immediately sealed his promise signified by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil the first time Adam and Eve ate the fruit of that tree, their eyes were opened (Gen 3:7). The covenant of works holds that Adam and Eve freely and frequently ate from the tree of life but that God did not seal on them the promise of eternal life as they ate. Rather, the covenant of works is Zwinglian with respect to the promise made by God by the tree of life. Adam is simply reminded each time he eats freely from that tree of what he must hope for, which is eternal life. His eating binds him in oath to God’s covenant of works.

The reformers had to discriminate against the tree of life in this way because of a Platonic or Aristotlean presupposition that that Adam and Evil were created with immortality, at least with an immortal soul.

Calvin writes in his commentary on Genesis

Three gradations, indeed, are to be noted in the creation of man; that his dead body was formed out of the dust of the earth; that it was endued with a soul, whence it should receive vital motion; and that on this soul God engraved his own image, to which immortality is annexed.

This presupposition renders the Calvin’s sacramental theology redundant with respect to the tree of life. Why would God promise, by means of a sacrament, to give Adam and Eve what they already possessed?

Had the reformers applied Calvin’s sacramental theology to both trees equally, they would have been required to reject a Platonic or Aristotlean understanding of the immortality of the soul and conclude instead that Adam and Eve did not possess immortality because God had not yet promised it to them.

Does the bible state that the human soul is immortal? I can’t think of any supporting references. We are told that God alone is immortal (1 Tim 6:16) and that the soul can be destroyed (Ps 109:31, Isa 10:18, Matt 10:2 . Unless explicitly stated in scripture we cannot simply assume that immortality is a communicable attribute.

Valentines Day! When our thoughts turn to…righteousness.

Looking back to my time at Oak Hill, I think I found it hard to hunger and thirst after righteousness whilst I was studying.

Thomas Watson points out seven reasons why I don’t hunger for righteousness like I should. Point 7 helps shed some light on my particular struggle whilst in academia:

Those who are soul-sick and ‘in the gall of bitterness’, find no sweetness in God or religion. Sin tastes sweeter to them; they have no spiritual hunger. That men do not have this ‘hunger after righteousness’ appears by these seven demonstrations:

1 They never felt any emptiness. They are full of their own righteousness (Romans 10:3).

2 That men do not hunger after righteousness appears because they can make a shift well enough to be without it. If they have oil in the cruse, the world coming in, they are well content. Grace is a commodity that is least missed. You shall hear men complain they lack health, they lack trading, but never complain they lack righteousness.

3 It is a sign they have none of this spiritual hunger, who desire rather sleep than food. They are more drowsy than hungry.

4 It appears that men have no spiritual hunger because they refuse their food. Christ and grace are offered, nay, pressed upon them, but they put away salvation from them as the froward child puts away the breast (Psalm 81: 11; Acts 13: 46).

5 It is a sign they have none of this spiritual hunger who delight more in the garnishing of the dish than in food. These are they who look more after elegance and notion in preaching than solid matter. …So when men are for jingling words and like rather gallantry of speech than spirituality of matter, it is a sign they have surfeited stomachs and ‘itching ears’.

6 They evidence little hunger after righteousness that prefer other things before it, namely, their profits and recreations.

7 It is a sign men have no spiritual hunger when they are more for disputes in religion than practice. When men feed only on hard questions and controversies (1 Timothy 6: 3, 4) (like some of the schoolmen’s ‘utrums’ and distinctions), as whether one may partake with him that does not have the work of grace in his heart, whether one ought not to separate from a church in case of mal-administration, what is to be thought of paedobaptism, etc. When these niceties and criticisms in religion take men’s heads, neglecting faith and holiness, these pick bones and do not feed on the meat. Sceptics in religion have hot brains but cold hearts. Did men hunger and thirst after righteousness they would propound to themselves such questions as these, How shall we do to be saved? How shall we make our calling and election sure? How shall we mortify our corruptions? But such as ravel out their time in frothy and litigious disputes, I call heaven to witness, they are strangers to this text. They do not ‘hunger and thirst after righteousness’.

Point seven now also helps me to get my priorities straight when facing schismatic doctrinal issues at church.

I live in house where everyone speaks at 90dB, including me. We’re working hard on our indoor voices. When things go pear shaped, through the inevitable times of exhaustion in ministry and chaos of having three small noisy children, tempers flare and the decibels hit at least 120. We don’t like it when it happens, but we put it down to our circumstances as a family and our individual sinful natures.

Once again, Thomas Watson blows my comfortable sinning out of the water. I especially enjoyed the ninth mark below. It’s all about grace…

1 The example of Jesus Christ. ‘Thy king cometh unto thee meek’ (Matthew 21:5). Christ was the sampler and pattern of meekness. ‘When he was reviled, he reviled not again’ (1 Peter 2: 23). His enemies’ words were more bitter than the gall they gave him, but Christ’s words were smoother than oil. He prayed and wept for his enemies. He calls us to learn of him: ‘Learn of me, for I am meek’ (Matthew 11:29).

2 Meekness is a great ornament to a Christian. ‘The ornament of a meek spirit’ (1 Peter 3: 4). A meek spirit brings credit to religion and silences malice. It is the varnish that puts lustre upon holiness, and sets off the gospel with a better gloss.

3 This is the way to be like God. God is meek towards them that provoke him. How many black mouths are opened daily against the Majesty of heaven? How do men tear his Name! vex his Spirit! crucify his Son afresh! They walk up and down the earth as so many devils covered with flesh, yet the Lord is meek, ‘not willing that any should perish’ (2 Peter 3: 9). How easily could God crush sinners, and kick them into hell! But he moderates his anger. Though he be full of majesty, yet full of meekness…

4 Meekness argues a noble and excellent spirit. A meek man is a valorous man. He gets a victory over himself. Passion arises from imbecility and weakness. Therefore we may observe old men and children are more choleric than others…

5 Meekness is the best way to conquer and melt the heart of an enemy. …Roughness hardens men’s hearts; meekness causes them to relent (2 Kings 6: 22).

6 Consider the great promise in the text. ‘The meek shall inherit the earth’.

7 Consider the mischief of an unmeek spirit. There is nothing makes such room for the devil to come into the heart and take possession, as wrath and anger. ‘Let not the sun go down upon your wrath, neither give place to the devil’ (Ephesians 4: 26, 27). When men let forth passion, they let in Satan. The wrathful man has the devil for his bedfellow. Passion hinders peace…

8 Another argument to cool the intemperate heat of our cursed hearts, is to consider that all the injuries and unkind usages we meet with from the world, do not fall out by chance, but are disposed of by the all-wise God for our good…

9 Want of meekness evidences want of grace. True grace inflames love and moderates anger. Grace is like the file which smoothes the rough iron. It files off the ruggedness of a man’s spirit. Grace says to the heart as Christ did to the angry sea, ‘Peace, be still’ (Mark 4: 39). So where there is grace in the heart, it stills the raging of passion and makes a calm. He who is in a perpetual frenzy, letting loose the reins to wrath and malice, never yet felt the sweet efficacy of grace. It is one of the sins of the heathen to be ‘implacable’ (Romans 1: 31). A revengeful cankered heart is not only heathenish, but devilish. ‘If ye have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, this wisdom descendeth not from above, but is devilish’…

10 If all that has been said will not serve to master this bedlam-humour of wrath and anger, let me tell you, you are the persons whom God steaks of who hate to be reformed. You are rebels against the Word…Will you walk with the devil? The furious man is possessed…