As we in the churches fumble for God’s way forward I sometimes wonder if we have missed what the Spirit of the Lord has been saying to the churches over the last generation or two. Perhaps not completely missed; just not really applied…
It is as if we had caught glimpses of the will of God for the churches but for whatever reason only run so far with the implications of what we have seen. I think about the call to a renewal of power through prayerful dependence on the gifts and grace of the Holy Spirit. I think about the call to discipleship by the likes of Juan Carlos Ortiz. I think about the call of the retreat movement to build our lives on habitual times of reclusion with God and his Word, drawing directly from him. I think about the call to see evangelism as belonging to the natural networks of associates friends and families and as flowing out of a willingness to serve. I think about the call to devolve the life of the churches into small groups. I think about the rediscovery many made through Alpha of the power of eating and drinking together and of sharing faith with an open hand. I think about the call to change our paradigms for leadership from models of control and mobilisation into models for resourcing and serving. I think of the international call of DAWN to move our goal posts from mega-church to multiple-church. I think we may also soon realise that there has been a call in the West to recover a sacred place in our lives for home life - that of the Christian family home and the Christian group-house.
This is not an exhaustive list by any means. The two things I reflect are that somehow all these elements are of a piece. Fundamentally they all rest on a change of attitude rather than the mere adoption of some new strategy. They are also races which we have somehow run something short of the finish line.
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You might feel that that is an easy or over-obvious thing to say. But I want to suggest that what we have missed does not lie in the sequence of answers that these moves reflect. I believe that often times our mistake has been to have anchored these answers to the wrong questions. The default question to which we seem to have related these questions is the question of habit: “How can we maintain what we’ve got?”
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Brothers and Sisters, let us repent of that question. Whether our churches are large or small, demonational or non, radical or traditional, “How can we maintain what we’ve got?” is not the question. The question is simply and only, “What does the Lord want us to do here? What does obedience to his Word and Spirit require of us today?”
Menno Simons - who, in terms of the church-hood (autonomy) of the Church,
made a fresher start than Luther, Calvin & Zwingli
We must ask that question with the reforming mindset. This is not a cataclysmic, stop-start approach to church-life - simply a matter of asking the right kinds of question in order to go in God’s direction.
(William Booth - fan of the original Methodists -
fresh-starter and founder of the Salvation Army)
Years ago I was involved with two churches in a city in the UK. They both occupied an area where the main energy of the community seemed to be among the children of the local poor and particularly broken families. Church A consisted of around 60 people whose church had been founded a century before precisely to reach this local, underprivileged population. However the elders of that church quickly decided that they did not welcome new people or converts from that demographic. I remember one single mum who, from a diffcult and fragmented background, turned her life around by giving it to Christ. She renouncied her new age dabblings and burned all her occult books. It was a sincere and decisive conversion. A couple of Sundays after she had given her life to the Lord she arrived at the church with her little baby girl to be told by an elder of the church, “You are exactly the kind of person we don’t want at this church.” Why? because she was not from the social stratum that elder preferred for his church. She was,,however, exactly the kind of person the Lord was reaching out to - from the exact demographic that, 100 years before, the church had been built to reach. Her experience was one of many similar. That church has struggled, shrunk and been annexed to an adjacent church in its denomination. It has withered on the vine because it did not want to be part of what God was doing. It simply wanted to maintain its current patterns and identity. The result has been death.
Church B consisted of 12 elderly believers in the same city. It embraced the needs of that same local demographic, by releasing its senior pastor to give 60-70% of his time to reaching out to the local families through programs for kids. Within five years that band of twelve had grown to four congregations - three of around 120 adults and a fourth of around 120 kids. From 12 to nearly 500 in five years is fruit that speaks for itself. Those 12 could have easily fallen into a “How can we keep our thing going?” mentality. But instead they gave themselves to a “How can we support what God is doing?” mindset. The result has been new life and phenomenal growth and multiplication.
The lesson is obvious. Jesus said that if we are always trying to save our life we will lose it. But if we are willing to lose our life for his sake we will find it. This is true of the individual and of the congregation. History bears this thesis out. Consider the witness of - for example - Francesco Bernadone and the Franciscans, Benedict of Nursia and the Benedictines, John Wesley and the Methodists, Menno Simms and the Anabaptists, Thomas Helwys and the early Baptists, the C19th missionary movements, William Booth and the Salvationists.
(left: John Wesley - fresh-starter and founder of the Methodist churches)
(right: Benedict of Nursia who inspired a sequence of ministries through community & hospitality which ran for 1300 years before being federated, held together only by values and relationships and a shared rhythm of life. Even today the witness of the Benedictine communities is powerful and prophetic. That’s radical!)
Though they may now read like a list of institutions and their founders the reason history has marked their stories lies in the fruit of their willingness to move away from thinking “How can we prop this thing up?” and then to really run perseveringly with the answers that came when they asked “What does the Lord want us to do here? What does obedience to his Word and Spirit require of us today?” In all our churches large or small this is a great habit to form.
