The Institute of Evangelism

Every Church an Evangelizing Community!

Good Idea is our online magazine where you’ll find inspiration, tips, ideas, and stories of how God is working in other churches. Every month we offer one good idea to help churches grow in sharing the faith.

Good Idea!

Having Second Thoughts about Evangelism

by .

John Bowen’s book, Evangelism for ‘Normal’ People, was published in 2002. Since then it has sold 10,000bowen book copies, and been used as a textbook in several seminaries. But 2002 is a long time ago. What does the author think now?

 

It all began with an email. I had known Andy when he was a doctoral student at Duke, and now he was a professor at another seminary. He had been using Evangelism for ‘Normal’ People as a textbook, and now he wanted to know if I would be willing to skype with the class at the end of the term to discuss the book. I said yes (how could I refuse?) but then began to wonder: What did I actually say in the book? (Authors don’t often re-read their books once they’re published.) Do I still think those things? It was a good exercise for me to reflect. Here are some of my conclusions:

  1. The Gospel is always bigger

I think my appreciation for the sheer bigness of the Gospel has increased. I would go further, and say that the Gospel should actually be the starting point for all of our theology. Some think the starting point for theology should be the mission of God (the “missio dei”) but surely the only way we know that God has a mission to redeem the world is because of Jesus’ announcement of the Gospel! The Gospel is the key to understanding what a Christian is (an apprentice of Jesus in the mission of God), what church is (the community of apprentices where the Gospel is spoken and lived out), what worship is (our hearts’ response to the Gospel), and (of course) what evangelism is (inviting others to respond to the Gospel). The Gospel is absolutely key.

These days, I am reluctant to say anything about evangelism until we have talked about the Gospel. Until there is passion for the Gospel—the evangel—there will be no healthy evangelism.

  1. Evangelism and discipleship are on the same spectrum

I don’t know why I didn’t say more about discipleship in the book. Now it seems obvious to me that evangelism and discipleship are not separate things. Thus, when people ask why Christians are not living as disciples, my question is: “What Gospel had they heard? What on earth did they think they were getting into? Why does the challenge of discipleship come as a surprise to them?”

The Good News is that God is at work to restore all things (the kingdom), and the invitation of the Gospel is to commit to that message—firstly, so that the work of restoration can be carried out in us (aka “sanctification”), but also so that we can be co-workers with God, and play our part in the restoration project (aka “vocation”). “Repent” means giving up the leadership of your own life; “believe” means giving your life to being a disciple of Jesus. So, if you are not a disciple, what exactly is the message you heard?

One practical outworking of this is that as people explore the Gospel, they need to be encouraged to try it. Not long ago, I was studying the Gospel of Luke in a local coffee shop with a young man who was trying to understand Christian faith. When the server asked what we were discussing, I let my friend do the answering. Why? Because if he becomes a disciple, he will have to learn to be upfront about his allegiance to Jesus. On another occasion, because I help out at a local reception centre for refugees, I encouraged my friend to come and help out too. Why? Because, as I explained to him, that’s the kind of thing that Christians do, and I wanted him to get a taste of it. In a sense, he was already beginning to “repent and believe.” In this kind of way, our evangelism needs to contain the seeds of discipleship. I don’t think I had seen that so clearly before.

  1. The significance of baptism

In my Christian upbringing, the important thing in evangelism was to help people get to the point where they would pray “a prayer of commitment.” The form of the prayer hardly mattered. Indeed, as Michael Green says, such a prayer can be just one word: “Yes!” They would then begin a life of involvement in the church and discipleship. And baptism? Well, yes, that was important too, as a public profession of new faith. But it was a “recommended extra.” There wasn’t much about it in Evangelism for ‘Normal’ People.

Now I would reverse those two and make baptism primary and the “personal prayer” secondary. (I can’t actually think of an example of a “personal prayer of commitment” in the New Testament accounts of evangelism! Baptism, however . . . It’s everywhere.)

So, for example, if I’m teaching a Christianity 101 course, I devote a session to explaining what it means to become a disciple—and spend some time unpacking the terms “repent and believe.” But do I invite people to say a “prayer of commitment” at the end? Well, yes, I do.

The way I explain it is to compare it to marriage (a biblical analogy, after all). “Praying a prayer,” I say, is like engagement. Engagement is usually a private commitment, very intimate, very personal, and there is no set form of words. Engagement is important and beautiful, but of course it’s only the first half of a much bigger commitment. Baptism, on the other hand, is like the marriage: it’s public, it’s formal, it’s a community celebration, and the form it takes is (more or less) standard.

Thus at the end of that C101 session, I often offer people a “personal prayer” to pray in the quiet of their hearts. But then I add, “If you prayed that prayer, do give your name to the minister before you leave tonight, because she is arranging a date for the next baptisms, and would love to include you.”

  1. Church planting and evangelism

Something that was hardly on my radar in 2002 was the importance of church planting for evangelism. But the evidence is now quite clear. The Southern Baptists in the US, for example, who have tracked where conversions are happening, are seeing more than three times the number of people coming to faith in new churches than in their older churches—and this in a denomination that majors on evangelism! Because of this development, I taught my first course on church planting as one of Wycliffe College’s evangelism offerings in the fall of 2002.

Of course, it is equally clear that church planting will not usually take the same form today that it did in a Christendom era. Hence all the talk of “fresh expressions of church”—new churches which begin at the grassroots, grow out of a particular local culture, and develop into mature churches over a period of years. The Mission Shaped Church report, which catalysed a lot of the fresh expressions movement in the UK, was not published till 2004, two years after Evangelism for ‘Normal’ People. That’s meant a whole lot of learning for me.

  1. The significance of friendship

I notice that in Evangelism for ‘Normal’ People, I often refer to “inviting your friends to Christian events.” Now, I would say the problem with that approach is two-fold. One, that fewer people these days are interested in attending church events. (One friend, Karen Wilk, has actually written a book called Don’t Invite them to Church!) The other problem is that many Christians are too busy with activities in the Christian fellowship to build meaningful friendships, ones where faith can be shared, outside the church. And not much evangelism will happen until we are prepared to equip people to go out with confidence, and release them to do so. We need to complement our emphasis on “the church gathered for worship” with one on “the church scattered for witness and mission.”

Hmm. Maybe all this means there’s enough to justify writing another book. We’ll see.

Calvary: an Unashamedly One-Sided Movie Review

by .

Quick: name three movies with central characters who are fine Christians. Hmm, that’s what I thought.

Of course, there are some— Chariots of Fire (1981), The Mission (1986), Babette’s Feast (1987), Romero (1989), Cry the Beloved Country (1995) Dead Man Walking (1995), Amazing Grace (2006), and Of Gods and Men (2010) spring to mind immediately. Even if you have more than that on your list, you probably have enough fingers to spare to add another: Calvary (2014), starting Brendan Gleeson (remember Mad-Eye Moody in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows?).

Gleeson plays a Roman Catholic priest in rural Ireland (the scenery is breath-taking—almost another calvary moviecharacter in the film). The movie begins with one of the most dramatic openings in the history of cinema. (I could be wrong about that—there are a million movies I haven’t seen—but I somehow doubt it.) Quite rightly, the trailer features the opening scene. You can find it online. In it, the priest is sitting in the confessional, waiting for penitents. A man enters (though we never see him) but, instead of confessing, he informs the priest that he is going to kill him, and that he will do it a week from Sunday. The killing will be revenge for the sexual abuse the man suffered as a child at the hands of a priest now dead. And he chooses Father James for the simple reason that he is . . . a good priest.

The rest of the movie goes through the days of that week one by one, showing the priest going about his pastoral duties—confronting, comforting, serving, counselling, visiting the pub, arguing with the village atheist, administering last rites, and leading worship. Little by little, the tension grows as Sunday draws near. (Do not go unless you are feeling strong. To say the movie is intense is an understatement. Thank God for the rough and ready humour that punctuates the script.) And the ending is, well, stunning—and abrupt. (Two people laughed at that point the night I saw it. I guess they didn’t get it.)

Father James is a Christ-like character. There are even echoes of the clearing of the temple and the scourging. Yet he is also deeply fallible. He has a troubled relationship with his daughter (he wasn’t ordained until his wife died), he has a problem with alcohol, he has doubts, and he has a violent temper. And yet, and yet.

As a meditation on the Christian life, on being a witness, on what it means to serve Christ in life and in the shadow of death, to be aware of one’s fallennness and God’s grace, it doesn’t get any better than this. Too bad Calvary won’t get any Oscars. It deserves them.

Caring for the Stranger in our Midst

by and .

How Churches are Ministering to Immigrants

The Bible is pretty clear about the church’s responsibility to “strangers.” Recent research in Toronto reveals how—and why—churches are developing new ministries to recent arrivals in Canada.

Did you know? More than 70% of Toronto residents were either born in a different country, or have at iwasastrangerleast one parent who was born outside of Canada? And, more relevant to readers of good idea!, how do Canadian churches relate to immigrants? Earlier in 2014, we decided to find out.

We conducted four focus groups made up of leaders of ministries serving immigrants, foreign workers, refugees and international students in the GTA. Seventeen different individuals (nine women and eight men) from at least ten different denominations, representing at least nine different ethnicities, shared what they are doing and learning in their efforts to help immigrants and refugees setting and integrate into Canadian society.

Our research was inspired in part by the Beyond the Welcome national research project, which investigated how Canadian congregations are integrating new immigrants into the life of the worshipping community. (For more details, see http://ureachtoronto.com/content/beyond-welcome-how-canadian-churches-are-responding-canadas-immigrant-reality).

Although our research was Toronto-based, it is actually part of a larger, ecumenical research project covering the whole country facilitated by the Centre for Community Based Research (see http://www.communitybasedresearch.ca/Page/View/PDG) in cooperation with Crandall University, Trinity Western University, Christian Direction, Canadian Council of Churches, Evangelical Fellowship of Canada and the Tyndale Intercultural Ministry Centre.

We were not interested so much in statistics as in ideas: Why exactly are churches working among immigrants and refugees? What is their vision? Where did it come from? Who is driving it? The answers were surprising. Three things in particular stood out:

 Personal experience of immigration

Many of the respondents had themselves been immigrants and refugees. Several of the churches represented in the study actually saw themselves as “immigrant churches.” This was a strong motivator to help those who found themselves in similar situations of need.

 Teachings of the Bible

Different Biblical themes motivated this kind of ministry. For some, it was scriptures which speak of the believer’s responsibility to migrants (the “sojourners” of the Old Testament, for example). For others, it was the mandate to spread the Gospel and make disciples.

 Some expressed a concern that these two motivations be clearly separate—for instance, that it should be perfectly clear what a meeting would be about, so that nobody felt manipulated, or that their weakness was being taken advantage of. All stressed that seeking to live lives of service would be the most powerful thing to commend Christian faith to newcomers.

 Meeting a need

Common to all was the simple perception that here was a need that required a response. People and churches did not necessarily set out with the objective of helping newcomers settle and integrate. Rather, the concern arose simply because of changes people observed in their communities, and needs became obvious among the people they were meeting. It might be an international student who spoke wistfully of home and his mother’s cooking but is intrigued by what turkey might taste like at Thanksgiving. It could be a family that just arrived in the country who need help finding a doctor for their children and knowing how to get bus passes. It may be a Filipina nanny who is feeling lonely and is interested in conversation. Such were the things that sparked a response.

 The focus groups also discussed what churches and individuals were actually doing. Friendship between individuals and between families was a commonly recurring theme. Participants talked with obvious pleasure about developing long-term relationships, of eating together, and of getting to know one another in each other’s homes. Friendships like this—not just programs—were mentioned as being key to how effective churches are in helping newcomers settle and integrate.

 These relationships naturally led to churches and individuals offering practical help in a myriad of ways: finding furniture for a new apartment, giving rides to appointments, helping newcomers understand the transit system, helping search for housing or a job, and (not least) helping negotiate Canada’s refugee legislation. These churches worked wherever there was a need—with students, families, children, and caregivers. And they cared without discriminating among ethnicities, cultures, languages or religions. But all of these flowed out of personal relationships between individuals and families, which were clearly the primary factor in the ability of churches to help newcomers settle and integrate.

 What might this mean for your church? Involvement begins very simply, with the basic Christian commitment to love our neighbours as ourselves. One way that expresses itself is by befriending people we meet, and listening to their stories. And that in turn can lead to understanding the specific challenges and practical needs faced by immigrants and refugees. Secondly, we can be encouraged that many of the ministries we heard about started off not with a grandiose plan and major funding but in small responses to the needs of someone who was, or became, a friend. Understanding the needs of newcomers then provided the motivation to find out what resources were available in the local community. Congregations subsequently decided what action they could take—and a ministry grew, and was blessed.

Mark D. Chapman is Assistant Professor of Research Methods at Tyndale University College & Seminary in Toronto

James Watson is a consultant for Church Planting and Congregational Revitalization for The Salvation Army in Canada and Bermuda. He is also chair of UReachToronto.com.

Research Assistants on this project were: Andrea Chang, Nelson Chang

Other Research Team Members were: Steven Jung, Ivana Mendez Piscione, Carmen Wong, Robert Cousins

For further reading: Heisz, Andrew. 2006. “Canada’s global cities: Socio-economic conditions in Montréal, Toronto and Vancouver.” Trends and conditions in census metropolitan areas. Ottawa: Statistics Canada. Janzen, Rich, Mark D. Chapman and James W. Watson. 2012. “Integrating Immigrants into the Life of Canadian Urban Christian Congregations: Findings from a National Survey.” Review of Religious Research 53: 441-470. Ley, David. 2008. “The Immigrant Church as an Urban Service Hub.” Urban Studies 45, no. 10: 2057-2074.  For information on GTA resources, see: www.UReachToronto.com.

For updates on the national research project, see: http://www.communitybasedresearch.ca/Page/View/Get_Involved.

An Untold Story behind Mandela

by .

People sometimes say “the church shouldn’t be involved in politics.” But love of neighbour always has political implications. This story shows how Christian principles of leadership, peace-making and prayer defused a political powder-keg.

I stood in the cell where Nelson Mandela spent eighteen of his twenty-seven imprisoned years. While it now appeared unremarkable, it still seemed somewhat hallowed. As we walked about Robben Island, just off the South African coast near Cape Town, I tried to imagine Mandela’s feelings and to hear his many Mandela Prison Cellconversations with colleagues of the African National Congress (ANC). There must have been a sense of futility mingled with hope for their cause.

The end of apartheid The transition from white minority power over both the black and colored majority is a story like none other. A political system called apartheid had evolved through the early years of the twentieth century and came to full bloom in the 1960s. As its laws became more repressive and absurd, Mandela led the underground resistance and was eventually convicted by the white courts, as were many of his ANC associates. As the resistance grew to rebellion, the government finally realized that the laws needed changing and they eventually consulted Mandela while in prison. They promised his soon release and general elections to be held in 1994.

In 1990 the world watched and wondered as Mandela left prison and boarded a ferry to cross to Cape Town. His peaceful presence, his measured words, his respect for his captors and his carefully considered convictions showed that he was a leader of a different stripe. His mature wisdom and gracious manner suggested how he might someday govern.

This is the story that we all saw. But behind it was another story less reported in the major media. After so many decades of harsh rule under apartheid, the oppressed majority could have easily pursued retribution. And yet, their antagonisms were focused primarily on their own people, for the black community was divided. Mandela led the ANC while Buthelezi, chief of the large Zulu tribe in South Africa, led the Independence Freedom Party (IFP). The two sides were at each other’s throats, with killings on a regular basis.

South Africa was ruled by people who were steeped in the doctrines of the Dutch Reformed Church mixed with their need to survive as a majority. This had certain similarities to the position of early settlers in the United States who perpetuated the practice of slavery while trying to defending it biblically. But there were other spiritual influences in South Africa, one of the most dominant being the legacy of Andrew Murray, a minister who had died in 1917 but had left a rich heritage of Christian thinking in his more than 240 books. He is still read and appreciated around the world for his writings on prayer.

The threat of tribal violence As the Christian leaders in South Africa saw the conflict that was likely to happen, they mobilized in an effort of prayer for a peaceful resolution in a time of momentous change. At the same time, the leaders of the ANC and the IFP knew that the violence had to stop and they agreed to invite Henry Kissinger from the United States and Lord Carrington from Britain to assist in mediation. Adding to the foment was Buthelezi’s threat to forbid Zulus to vote in the coming election. This meant that when Mandela was elected—a forgone conclusion—Buthelezi could then declare that the election was illegitimate since a major tribe wasn’t part of the vote. This would, in effect, make Mandela a president without a mandate, an accusation which could rally the troops to further conflict, at the very time the white laws of apartheid were crumbling. What was seen as a wonderful transition was turning into a nightmare.

Mandela and Michael Cassidy
Mandela and Michael Cassidy

It was Michael Cassidy, a South African leader of African Enterprise, who saw the futility of high level mediation without also relying on God’s intervention. He reached out to Washington Okumu, a Christian professor from Kenya who was often called “the gentle giant” to join in the negotiations.

On April 14, 1994, thirteen days before the election, Kissinger and Carrington boarded planes to head home, with Kissinger offering a prediction that a million people would die in what he saw as a coming civil war.

Michael Cassidy went into action and rented a stadium in Durban and prayer meetings began to happen all over South Africa. While the prayer meetings were going on, Washington Okumu worked all night with the IFP to find a way to avoid the conflict. With an agreement in hand, he sped to the airport in Johannesburg to get Chief Buthelezi’s endorsement, but he arrived too late. The Chief has already left; at least he thought he had. A few minutes into the flight his pilot said they had an instrument problem and had to return to Johannesburg. Washington Okumu got his meeting with Buthelezi.

Preparing the way for a Cyrus On April 17, 25,000 people turned out for prayer at the Durban stadium, matched by smaller prayer groups around the country. And in the VIP lounge Washington Okumu and Buthelezi had final discussions on a settlement with President de Klerk, hammering out a plan while thousands were in prayer for a peaceful settlement.

Ten days later elections were held. The chief allowed his Zulu people to vote. Mandela was elected and not one person died from tribal conflict.

The convergence of leadership, skill and a will to pray brought change to a nation racked by decades of cruelty. Into that world at a time of enormous potential for good came a threat so severe that the country could have been torn apart. Michael Cassidy provided Christian leadership. Washington Okumu, a scholar of Christian faith, lent his considerable skill in negotiating. Thousands upon thousands reached out in prayer for their nation, believing that the Spirit would intervene in ways no one could predict. And God had his Cyrus, Mandela, to lead the people through the coming days.

Brian C. Stiller, Global Ambassador, The World Evangelical Alliance May 2014

Why the Church is like Dr Who

by .

Christianity—like the religion of ancient Israel—has undergone metamorphoses over the centuries. Maybe it is time for another one.

I have a friend, a recent immigrant, who is puzzled at much of what he sees in the Canadian church. In particular, he does not understand our reluctance to talk openly about the decline of churches across the country.

Are there good models of growth?

In the past year, I have been on several panels—ostensibly to discuss that very issue—only to find the moderator gently steering the discussion away from decline, and toward examples of churches that are successfully bucking the trend.

The only problem is that most of the churches held up as examples of healthy growth are growing with people who are previously churched. The good news, of course, is that these churches are catching people who might be lost to church and faith if these centres of excellence were not there to catch them.

The better news is that immigrant churches are filled and multiplying. But as a model of growth for other churches, it is limited—and masks the change that has already overtaken much of the western church and world.

If denial, despair, and celebration of non-missional growth were the only options on the menu, I would be truly depressed, but Willow Creek Community Church has pioneered another way: facing the problem. When their leadership team published the REVEAL report in 2008[i], it was a public confession that 63% of their core people were considering leaving the church, and only 7% said that the church was helping them to stay on track with their spiritual life. That kind of honesty takes courage.

The way forward

If we assume that the Gospel is not faulty, and that God has not left the building, andthat most church leaders are faithful, hardworking souls doing all that the Spirit has empowered them to do, then what is going on? Let’s start with some history.

The church almost died in infancy. Rome’s destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70 should have been catastrophic to the early church. In Acts 2, we see the apostles teaching in the Temple—a sensible strategic location of spiritual authority for Jesus’ followers and the Jewish diaspora who had also put their faith in Christ.

Some scholars see the horror of those days reflected in St. John’s Apocalypse, the Book of Revelation. It was an Apocalypse. Despite the loss of physical location and the martyrdom of almost the entire first generation of apostles, we see the regeneration of an entirely different Church, inwardly carrying the same identity and memories, but outwardly almost unrecognizable.

The shift was so complete that those who continued untransformed became known as Judaisers, simply because they wanted to retain early practices of the apostles such as circumcision, dietary restrictions, and festival days. The rest of the Church had moved on to become a multi-centred Gentile/Jewish phenomenon—while inwardly reflecting God’s original mission with fresh clarity and fruitful effect.

Apocalypse is a wonderful New Testament word, not to be confused with the modern secular meaning of doom and destruction, as in “Zombie Apocalypse”—but almost as dramatic. Apocalypse simply means revealing what is hidden in plain sight: God’s plans and purposes through cataclysmic events.

In times of discontinuous change, the formulas don’t work any more. Fortunately, we have stellar examples of how God moves faith communities through something more than change: it looks more like death followed by resurrection.

The morphing of Judaism

change One example was the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in the sixth century BC, and the exile of God’s people in Babylon for seventy years. Imagine a faith whose entire practice had revolved for centuries around burnt offerings by a clergy trained only for Temple service. Then, for more than seventy years in exile, those priests had no vocation and no location. Ordinary people of faith raised children and grandchildren who no longer spoke the language, kept the festivals, or made the necessary sacrifices. As a result, when the exiles returned from Babylon to Jerusalem, their faith in God had regenerated in a radically different form.

The Temple was rebuilt eventually—but not before the portable Torah had supplanted fixed altar sacrifice as the centre of faith, and priests had given way to teachers of the law. Sabbath was practiced at the family table, led by mothers; and communities of faith sprang into being wherever ten men could make a quorum. Judaism had become portable, and less dependent on inherited priests and places.

As a result, when the Temple was destroyed a second time in 70 AD, God’s people were entirely equipped to continue without it. Fast forward 400 years to a Church that has completely adapted to the new realities of the Roman Empire. The faith has travelled Roman roads using the Roman language, building churches in Roman towns with patterns of government compatible with Roman culture. Brilliant! That is, until the Roman Empire fell, and Roman churches languished and sank into disrepair and disuse. This might have been the end, except that un-Romanized “barbarians” on the fringes of the former Empire began to build monastic communities that sent out missionaries to build new communities, and re-evangelize the world.

The Reformation was another such Apocalyptic event. Respect for the institutional church had plummeted, and faith in God was shaken by catastrophic events—climate change, plague and famine. The rediscovery of God in scripture as Christians drifted from corrupt institutions was a Godsend in every sense of the word.

Uncertainty and expectation

Like Doctor Who and his Tardis, the Church hasregenerated in another body each time—almost unrecognizable in appearance to those used to the older forms, but identical in heart and memory.

Most Canadian church leaders acknowledge that something very dramatic has happened to much of the church in Canada, but we hardly know how to talk about it, let alone undo it on a large scale—even if “undoing” were the right (or even a possible) response.

We are seeing pieces of this new regeneration, I think, in such areas as fresh expressions of church, transplanting the nucleus of a new congregation from vibrant churches into old buildings, emerging church planting movements, house churches, new monastic communities, and other places that are still in the process of morphing from one body to another.

Oswald Chambers was prescient when he said:

 Naturally, we are inclined to be so mathematical and calculating that we look upon uncertainty as a bad thing. . . . [But] to be certain of God means that we are uncertain in all our ways, we do not know what a day may bring forth. This is generally said with a sigh of sadness; it should rather be an expression of breathless expectation.[ii]

 Only the perspective of time will illuminate the reasons behind our era of change, but a few clear lines are already emerging from the mist. In my denominational tradition, the precipitous declines were underwritten with denial for decades. It seemed the better alternative to despair. It wasn’t. It isn’t.

Apocalypse is a bad-news word if the undead walk among us. It is a good news word for the Church of Jesus Christ risen from the dead. It is good news for a church that believes that it was founded on a rock against which the gates of hell cannot prevail. It is excellent news if we believe that the answers are hidden in plain sight.

[i] Greg L. Hawkins and Cally Parkinson, REVEAL: Where are you? (Willow Creek Association, 2008)
[ii] Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest (New York: Dodd and Mead, 1935), 120.

Confessions of a Confused Church Planter

by .

Where do we find significance in a life of ordained ministry? One church-planter made an important discovery.

There is a heroic sense of purpose and urgency that comes with the idea of inaugurating a new church.

At least that’s how I felt in 2005—but by 2013 the feeling had painfully worn off. The mission of a new start in a new territory had been taken hostage by a new inability to see the future. Afflicted by a deep sense of loss, I found it unbearable to think of myself apart from what I had helped start.

Even after our bags were packed for the next ministry appointment, I had doubts about the legitimacy of pastoral work in a traditional setting. I was certain that I had sold my soul to the many grade givers, as Henri Nouwen once said,[1] and in turn disappointed the people that I loved most.

 Future Shock

There was a time when I knew where we had to go. With great precision and great people, we confidently navigated the first steps of a new church. It was not easy, but we felt invincible. Each move felt more obvious than the last as all the pieces wonderfully fell into place.

The proof, in our minds, was in the stories that we were collecting along the way. Like the time where the majority of keys to our building belonged to people who were not part of our worshipping community, but part of our neighbourhood. Or the time that it took six years for a woman to trust us enough to allow us into her life. The list only grew from there. There’s the story about Baby Basket, the one about the Booty Call, the one about the Art Festival, and the one about The Business. For the outsider, these words and stories mean nothing, but for us they were code for “God is at work,” and by them I felt as though I could see the future.

Until I couldn’t anymore.

By 2012, dark clouds began to roll into my soul, causing a fog so thick that I could no longer see what was ahead. This would later lead to a sabbatical that began with a sense of pride (Yes! They can do this without me!) that quickly turned into a panic (Oh no! They can do this without me!). As I spent those three months stumbling in the dark, I kept asking God to renew my sense of passion for the church plant, but it never came.

I hassled the Holy Spirit for a new sense of direction, but that too never materialized. There were plenty of voices prescribing what I should do, but they only contributed to the poor visibility. And as I toyed with the possibilities and options before me, I kept coming back to what I would later recognize as my greatest fear: that I was about to run out of good stories. Whether I persisted in the dark, or sought sunnier pastures, I feared that my courage had expired and, because of that, I could no longer see the future.

Illegitimate Work

Months would pass, during which I transitioned from being a bi-vocational pastor to being a volunteer pastor, to being once again a full time pastor—only this time at a different church, in a different province.

This new position had everything I had felt missing including stability, opportunity, and the challenge to help fix something that was broken. On paper, this was a perfect match, and there was a strong sense from my peers and mentors that this would be a healthy move for our family.

But even before we were fully unpacked, it started all over again.moon-sun-and-clouds_57553

Despite the fact that I felt very good, that work felt meaningful again, and that I was meeting new people I believed I could grow to love, there was this aching sense that my transition into an established, traditional setting was an illegitimate one. It was too easy and too good. Church planting was virtuous and self-sacrificing work, but this steady gig was a sign that I had truly given up on doing anything significant with my life. It may sound over-dramatic, but it really felt that way.

More old stories then came back to haunt me. Like the time we couldn’t afford to keep the heat on in the church building during the week, so we had to wear coats and hats while we worked. Or the year our combined household income was $26,000—that is, one thousand dollars less then I made alone at my first full-time job. Or the time the church emptied its bank account to pay for dentures for a man who had lost his teeth and his job. This was important work! This was front line ministry! This is where I needed to be.

Clearly Beloved

Weeks later, by way of a trusted friend, I finally heard what I had known to be true all along: this isn’t about my performance. I don’t need to prove my worth or justify my work. I don’t need to manufacture reasons or re-phrase excuses as to why things have changed. There is something of greater importance than what I can produce. Author and Episcopal priest Robert Capon puts it best by saying:

The will of God now becomes not the orders of a superior directing what a subordinate must do, but the longing of a lover for what the beloved is. It is a desire, not for a performance, but for a person; a wish not that the beloved will be obedient, but that she will be herself—the self that is already loved to distraction. The will of God, seen this way, is not in order to something, but because of Someone.[2]

Today things are a little less foggy. I recognize that I am an accomplice in my own demise, dulling my awareness with distractions of every kind while feeding my appetite for good with the junk food of accomplishment. Yet all the while the Lover reminds me that I am his Beloved not for any other reason than the fact that he has willed it.

 

Joe Manafo is an ordained minister with the Free Methodist Church of Canada, Teaching Pastor at Lakeview Church in Saskatoon, and author of . . . And We Will Become a Happy Ending.

Joe was one of the two plenary speakers at the Vital Church Planting conference this year.

[1] Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life (Ave Maria Press, 1974), 18.

[2] Robert Capon, Hunting the Divine Fox: Images and Mystery in the Christian Faith (Seabury Press, 1974), 38.

 

Vacuum Cleaner Church

by .

We sometimes forget that the church exists from Monday to Saturday, and not only on Sunday. So why do we spend so much time thinking vacuum cleaner editedabout our gathering on Sunday—and so little about being the church during the week?

 Have you heard the term “vacuum cleaner church”? Whether you’ve heard it or not, you’ve probably experienced it. “Oh, can you help out with this committee? Can you do a reading this Sunday? Why don’t you join this small group?” It goes on and on. I remember a friend joking that there was only one night a week when she was at home, and her husband was worried that she’d give that one up to being “at the church” too. It wasn’t a particularly funny joke.

The trouble is that it is all too easy to measure people’s spiritual maturity by the amount of time they spend in the four walls of the church building, or in “church”-related activities. They’re the people we value most, the people we trust with yet more responsibilities, and the people we reward.

What is the church?

What is wrong with this picture? It assumes a very distorted understanding of “the church.” What is church? Church consists of those who have responded to God’s call to “repent and believe” through faith and baptism. And what does “repent and believe” mean? Jesus connects it with his announcement of “the kingdom” (Mark 1:15). So we could paraphrase Jesus’ words about the arrival of the kingdom this way: “Now I’m here, God’s plan to restore and renew the world is reaching its climax: drop whatever you’re doing and come join me. Stop wasting your lives and get with God’s program!”

If this is the heart of church, then how does it operate? Some have suggested that church exists in two modes, the “gathered mode” (when we come together for worship and teaching) and the “scattered mode” (the rest of the week, when we live our lives in the places God has called us—home, work, or leisure). Church is an apprenticeship in the ways of the kingdom, a co-op program with a (relatively small) classroom component, and an on-the-job component (most of the time).

The trouble is that church leaders usually value the gathered mode more than the scattered mode. It’s natural enough, since—traditionally anyway—the focus of seminary training has been how to lead the church in gathered mode with excellence. But Lesslie Newbigin warned, over a quarter of a century ago, that this is not enough: “it seems clear that ministerial training as currently conceived is still far too much training for pastoral care of the existing congregation, and far too little oriented towards the missionary calling to claim the whole of public life for Christ and his kingdom.”[1] Did you notice the word “still” in there? He was looking back—and in 1977!—and seeing that even then this was a long-standing problem. So has it changed since then?

The need for missional leadership

In recent years, seminaries like Wycliffe and Tyndale have increasingly reoriented their teaching and training to take on a missional dimension: that is, like the church in general, we have realised that the purpose of the church is to work with God in God’s mission to renew and restore the cosmos. The church is not there to supply services to religious consumers, or to meet people’s “spiritual needs,” or to provide a “spiritual dimension” to society’s life. We are a community of Jesus Christ’s apprentices in the transformation of the world for the glory of God. This is the key to understanding Scripture. This helps us know who we are meant to be in a post-Christendom world.

But I’m not sure this awareness has percolated through into the life of the average local church. Our instinct is still to suck people in to innumerable activities—all of them worthwhile, of course—within the church community (and all too often in the church building), instead of seeing church events as equipping Christians for their missionary work in “the world.”

John Stott warned us of this danger almost forty years ago:

A convert to Jesus Christ lives in the world as well as in the church, and has responsibilities to the world as well as to the church. I think it is the tendency of churches to “ecclesiasticize” their members which has made so many modern Christians understandably wary . . . Conversion must not take the convert out of the world but rather send him back into it, the same person in the same world, and yet a new person with new convictions and new standards. If Jesus’ first command was “Come,” his second was “Go”—that is, we are to go back into the world out of which we have come, and go back as Christ’s ambassadors.[2]

Rather than honouring those who spend all their time “in church,” perhaps we should worry about them. How will they ever mature as apprentices of Jesus that way? How will they have time to fulfil their mission in the world? Of course, some people are required—and gifted—to maintain existing church structures. After all, we do need those structures to equip and sustain us for mission. But my hunch is not as many people, and not as often.

Maybe some of those who are in “gathered mode” too much of the time need to be pushed out of the nest so they can learn to fly—for their own good and the good of the mission. The opposite is also worth considering. We sometimes worry whether those who only show up on Sundays, and resist serving on church committees. We even question their commitment: are they really growing in their discipleship? But it may be that if we scratched the surface of those people’s lives, we would find that they are too involved with loving their neighbours to serve on yet another church committee.

Sending out, not sucking in

I had a friend once who started literally dozens of Bible study groups in workplaces across his city. Over the years, they saw about a hundred people come to Christian faith through their witness. My friend’s church—a Baptist church—said, “Look we would love to have you as one of our elders, but this work you are doing across the city is your mission, and putting you on a church committee would just be a waste of your gifts. So we will pray for you and support you in any way we can.” A truly missional response. After some years, my friend moved to a job on the other side of the country. So the man who had acted as Vice-President of the group was asked to take over the leadership. His response? “I would love to do that, but I’m much too busy in my church. Thanks, but no thanks.” Not surprisingly, the ministry declined in size and effectiveness.

Jesus said we are the salt of the earth. Good Christian leaders will ensure that the salt gets sprinkled liberally where it is most needed, and beware the piles that accumulate on the side of the plate. Or, to change the image: Christians are rather like manure: spread thinly, they do a great job. But gather too many of them together for too long, and they begin to smell pretty bad.

[1] Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1989), 230-231.

[2] John R.W.Stott, Christian Mission in the Modern World (IVP, 1975), 121.

Serving the Gospel Together

by .

How one community pursues church unity for the sake of mission

When the ice storm knocked out the power just before Christmas, the Methodists were in trouble: no heat, no light, no sound system. Did that mean no Christmas Eve carol service? Not in the small community (pop. 9,704) of Acton, Ontario. The Methodist pastor did the obvious thing: picked up the phone and called his friend the Anglican priest across town, where there was power. What resulted was a beautiful blended service, with leadership from both ministers, and a stronger witness to the meaning of Christmas than would have been possible for two separate services on opposite sides of town.

teamwork-unitySuch things do not happen out of the blue, of course. But in Acton, seventy kilometres north-west of Toronto, there has been active partnership between the nine churches in town for over sixty years, so this was a perfectly natural thing to do.

 Every year, the churches work on a number of events together. Some are ministerial meetings or joint worship services—the sort of thing that occurs in many communities across Canada. But what it is striking about the work in Acton is that there is an explicit intention to work together, not as an end in itself, but as a means to more effective mission. Jesus’ prayer for unity in John 17 makes it clear that only when his disciples are united will the world recognise who he is, and believe. He prays “that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” (21) Unity and mission are inseparable.

 So what kind of things do the churches in Acton do?

Events are a healthy mixture. Some aim to strengthen relationships between clergy and congregations. Other events seek to be a witness by word and life to the community around.

  •  Leadership of the ministerial rotates. At present, meetings take place at the Roman Catholic church; the chair is the Christian Reformed pastor, the Vice-chair is the Anglican priest, and the treasurer is a Salvation Army officer.
  •  For Back to Church Sunday in September, cards are distributed around the community, not recommending any particular church or denomination, but simply inviting folks to visit “Any Church in Acton.”
  •  In Advent, the churches work together on a “Keep Christ in Christmas” advertising campaign. Large signs are placed Acton_Ministerial_Dec_2009 largerstrategically around town, and smaller ones are sold for people to place on their lawns.
  •  In early Advent, churches partner with the local funeral homes to arrange a Christmas Memorial Service. Ads are placed in the newspapers, and personal invitations are sent to all those who have lost loved ones during the previous year. Different churches take it in turns to host the service, and representatives from each church participate.
  •  Then, once the busy Christmas season is over, members of the Ministerial and their partners meet to socialize and enjoy a dinner prepared and served by the Knights of Columbus. Not surprisingly, the social aspect of Ministerial meetings has emerged as a valuable tool for growing friendships within the group and enhancing our unity.
  •  On the Sunday of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, as for the last twenty-one years, all the Acton churches cancel their individual services and gather together at the Acton Legion for a town-wide joint service of worship. This service attracts between 500 and 700 worshippers and features a Unity Choir drawn from all the churches, a praise team, and a children’s program. While all clergy are involved in the service, each year a different denomination chooses the guest speaker. This January, it was the turn of the Anglicans, and John Bowen of the Institute of Evangelism was the preacher, on the theme, “Has Christ been Divided?” The offering at this service is a major source of funding for Ministerial events throughout the year.
  •  Good Friday marks another public witness to faith, with a procession featuring a cross making its way through the town. The procession stops for suitable readings outside each church. The event ends with hot cross buns (of course!) and hot drinks at one of the churches.
  •  In 2013, the Ministerial undertook an ambitious evangelistic campaign involving the purchase and distribution to every home in the community of 5,000 copies of a DVD based on the life of Christ to every home in the Acton area. This was accompanied by an invitation to a Palm Sunday performance of an Easter Cantata by the joint church choirs. In the weeks that followed, every church reported that people had come by asking for more copies of the DVD.

Has the community noticed what is going on?

It’s indicative of the answer that the Mayor has approached the churches in Acton to provide volunteer help with a Spring Clean-up to deal with the debris from the ice storm. A guest speaker from a community support group, “Links2Care,” will shortly be addressing the ministerial about ways they can partner with the churches to provide social support in the community.

And at least one church has experienced a growth of 20% in recent years, attributable largely to the outward-looking focus of the churches.

Working with Habitat for Humanity

In the fall of 2013, the Ministerial took a further step to serve the community of Acton in the name of Christ. Since Acton is an area of low income and in need of affordable housing, it made sense to see if they could co-operate on building a house for Habitat for Humanity. What they did not know at that point was that Habitat for Humanity had already identified Acton as an area of great need, and were in the early stages of seeking a Community Champion to generate local support.

They were delighted to partner with the Acton Ministerial and, at this year’s 2014 Unity Service, representatives from Habitat for Humanity announced to the assembled churches that the land had been identified, and the planning application submitted to build—not just for one home, as expected, but for up to thirteen homes on a piece of land known as “Trinity Court.”

God is at work in Acton

Nine diverse churches working together are bearing witness to the Gospel in a far more powerful way than would be possible for any one church alone. Our prayer is that Jesus’ prayer may be answered, and that many may believe as they see his disciples at work together in the community.

Brian Galligan is the Rector of St. Alban the Martyr Anglican Church in Acton, Ontario.

  • Get a Good Idea once a month

    Get the Good Ideas e-newsletter monthly on how to share your faith and build up the people around you. It’s completely free and our gift to you.

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.