Transforming Grace

I’ve culled the table below from Mark Driscoll’s Radical Reformission and hope he doesn’t mind. It highlights the difference between routine presentation and reformission participation evangelism and has helped me think not only about personal, friendship evangelism but about how we should seek to grow our small groups.

It is obvious as I read the table that both types of evangelism involve some sort of friendship or sharing lives. The question Driscoll seems to raise is: at what stage should Christians begin to invest their time, energy and emotions in a relationship; before or after the conversion of their friend?

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The difference between the two is not only the much earlier formation of a genuine friendship in the reformission model but the direction of mission. The routine model, I believe, highlights the relatively low investment in friendships outside church as the model seeks to draw people into the church culture before friendships are built. The second model highlights the model of getting out into the surrounding culture and investing real time, energy and emotion in making real friends (1 Thess 2:8). The difference can be shown like this:

This model should influence the way we think about growing our small groups. Rather than draw people into existing circles of friends, we should set up groups within existing friendship networks, meeting where they already meet, which is (in spite of all I have said against it) the essence of the homogenous church growth principle. More on this in a later post.

Here’s two quotes, the first from Total Church and the second from Jonathan Fletcher’s recent Reform paper (it arrived in the post yesterday) Back To The Future. Reforming The Church of England - Learning From The Past, both highlighting the same problem…evangelical ministers are scared of the inner city.

First, Chester and Timmis:

A church in a prosperous town with 27,000 inhabitants received over 60 applications for the post of assistant pastor. At the same time a church in the north of England with an established evangelical ministry serving a city of several hundred thousand people could not get one application for the post of assistant pastor. People sometimes claim it is a question of calling. They do not dispute the validity of ministry to the poor, but feel their calling is to the rich. That is not Luke’s pitch to Theophilus. And it does not explain why God apparently calls far more people to prosperous areas than he does to the poorer areas of the nation! In reality the only call in the Bible is the call to the way of the cross, the way of service, sacrificial love and suffering. (Total Church, p80)

And Jonathan Fletcher:

By the same token, it is rather sad that evangelicals have got a bad reputation of not going to Urban Priority Areas, such that when St Nicholas’ Tooting was advertised as an evangelical church only two people applied for it. We will not win the country unless we can stick with those sorts of places. The model that Holy Trinity Brompton in London has given us of planting in existing parish churches that are about to close and giving them new life is remarkable. We must not lose those opportunities.

If enough leaders say this, perhaps an increased number of ministers will get a heart for the inner city. On the other hand, as Paul writes, how are they to call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? (Romans 10:14).

The figures quoted above, in light of the gospel, should bring tears to our hearts, if not our eyes, and move us en masse to the inner city.

Much has been written about the UK suffering a lack of identity and about how multi-culturalism fuels sectarianism and segregation in society. Christians have long spoken about church being a place where people of all tongues, tribes and nations worship together (Rev 5:9). But we must not make truly diverse churches the goal or an end in themselves. Multi-cultural, ethnically diverse and class inclusive churches will result as a product of the message of the cross. If our churches are homogeneous in a multi-cultural, multi-class area we need to ask, “are we really preaching and living Christ crucified for sin?” Timmis and Chester make this observation in Total Church:

The big question is why the church in the West is failing to reach the poor and marginalized in our society. If our churches do not reflect the reality Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 1, then we have to ask ourselves whether in the message we have proclaimed, the way we have proclaimed it, the church cultures we have created, the expectation we have of church members, in some or all of these ways we have not been true to the message of the cross. We have left room for boasting. Instead of nullifying status, intellect and wealth, we have valued these things too highly and so nullified the message of ‘Christ and him crucified’ (2:2). Conservative Christians are right to oppose any downgrade in the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. But we must examine ourselves to see whether we too are robbing the cross of its power. (p81)

In an earlier post breaking out of middle class suburbia I wrote

I believe homogeneous churches in a multicultural society deny, by their very existence, that salvation is by grace alone

I had used the term “lower socio-economic group” to describe the people overlooked by many suburban professional churches. In Total Church, Timmis and Chester are more refreshingly blunt. They point out that churches which fail to reach people from lower socio-economic groups are classist and that classism puts the grace of God “at stake”.

…class consciousness runs deep in British evangelicalism. One church leader commented to me recently: ‘Social class is British evangelicalism’s equivalent of racism in American evangelicalism.’ The failure to renew our social outlook (Romans 12:2) creates mistrust between the classes and races. Individuals are seen as being (or not being) ‘one of us’. I hope this is mostly subconscious. It means the leadership in conservative evangelicalism largely runs along lines of social class. Those from a lower social class who achieve positions of prominence do so by adopting the culture of the upper class. Many of the divisions within evangelicalism are as much about social class as theological differences. In one direction people are seen as vulgar; in the other direction people are seen as snobbish.

Why does this matter? It matters because we are failing to reach the working class with the gospel. Evangelicalism has become a largely middle-class, professional phenomenon. When we invite people to our dinners and our churches, we invite our friends, our relatives and our rich neighbours. We do not invite the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame. What is at stake is the grace of God. (Total Church, p74)

Timmis and Chester point to a 2003 report by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity which concluded:

The reason the UK church is not effective in mission is because we are not making disciples who can live well for Christ in today’s culture and engage compellingly with the people they meet … Jesus has a “train and release” strategy, while overall we have a “convert and retain” strategy. (Total Church, p35)

The Crowded House has no central church meeting, people are trained as leaders and released into small house churches. The practice of “train and release” can be applied to churches like St Luke’s which do meet together on a Sunday morning. It is a matter of where we focus our energy.

We’ve noticed that many people in Blakenhall are happy to meet midweek for 1-2-1 bible study or at a small group but that Sunday service attendance does not always follow. We are conditioned by tradition and mission statistics to think that new Christians must come to church on Sunday or we are not being effective. Much of our weekly energy is spent producing a Sunday service where people will want to come and stay. Often, though, I will fail to produce that critical excellence or “ambiance” from the front.

The idea of Total Church is to focus energy in the harvest field and not the barn. By training people to lead a small church (group bible study, pastoral care and mission) the gospel is more widely proclaimed and small gospel communities created.

The main Sunday service might then attract many, but not all, of the people in small groups. People will come on Sunday not primarily because of my performance at the front but because of the quality of relationships, teaching and care offered on a small scale in homes.

I read Total Church by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis’ whilst in Suffolk. Chester and Timmis make a compelling argument for far more cross cultural mission to the working class, benefit class and unskilled immigrant population of inner city Britain. They paint a bleak picture of a largely ghettoised middle-class church in Britain from their perspective of church planting in inner city Sheffield.

Much of what they write strikes a chord with the way I’ve seen things from Blakenhall. Themes I found helpful included:

1. The gospel of substitutionary atonement and gospel community are as inseparable as fire from burning, they are inextricably connected.
2. British churches are largely middle class ghettos which have failed to reach the working class and by doing so have emptied the cross of its power.
3. The smaller the church group the greater the relational cohesion between, and mission effectiveness of, its members.
4. Event driven churches are passée and ineffective, much more energy should be invested in teaching the bible relationally, that is 1-2-1 and in small groups.
5. 1000 teenagers leave the church in the UK every week. Our youth need small group bible study in a setting where they mix with a few godly role models who care for them and provide a stepping stone into grown up church.

If you would like an overview, Michael Jensen has written a review of Total Church and I’ll blog a bit on things I liked in the days ahead…

I’ve started reading Total Church by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis. The introduction brings in some of the ideas I’ve preached on recently; church being something we belong to not simply attend (1 Cor 12); church being a messy place which demands patience as people are brought to Christ from a broken society (2 Peter 3:9); the need for training young Christians by modelling godliness as more mature Christians hang out with them (Titus 2); not being frightened to go to the fringes of society for fear of being defiled (Titus 1:13-15).

Here’s some ideas from the introduction which make me look forward to reading the rest of the book:

John Stott says: ‘Our static, inflexible, self-centred structures are “heretical structures” because they embody a heretical doctrine of the church.’ If ‘our structure has become an end in itself, not a means of saving the world’ it is ‘a heretical structure’.

Being both gospel-centred and community-centred might mean:

• seeing church as an identity instead of a responsibility to be juggled alongside other commitments
• celebrating ordinary life as the context in which the word of God is proclaimed with ‘God-talk’ a normal feature of everyday conversation
• running fewer evangelistic events, youth clubs and social projects, and spending more time sharing our lives with unbelievers
• starting new congregations instead of growing existing ones
• preparing Bible talks with other people instead of just studying alone at a desk
• adopting a 24-7 approach to mission and pastoral care instead of starting ministry programmes
• switching the emphasis from Bible teaching to Bible learning and action
• spending more time with people on the margins of society
• learning to disciple one another — and be discipled — day by day
• having churches that are messy instead of churches that pretend