Community Evangelism

At the moment I'm reading 'Total Church' and 'Everyday Church', both by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis.  There is lots in them that I like a lot.

In Total Church we are presented with a community rather than individualistic model of evangelism

Both these books talk about the importance of evangelism in community.  They propose that the model of church where people come to us is irrelevant in cultures like the UK and Australia because most people have no intention of ever visiting a church, so it doesn't matter how good the program is since people aren't coming anyway. 

Instead they propose a model of evangelism that takes place in community.  In order for this to take place these communities need to exist.  Tim Chester and Steve Timmis lead a  church called The Crowded House.  It's made up of what they call gospel communities.  These gospel communities are like large Bible study groups, but much more.  They're made up of groups of Christians committed to sharing their lives together.  These groups meet together several times a week for normal things as well as things like Bible study and prayer.  They share quite a lot of meals together as well.

When people in these gospel communities get to know non-Christians, then, when they invite them into their lives, they're inviting them into these gospel communities.  If I invited a non-Christian friend to my place for dinner, it would be done with other Christians there.  If we went to the park with our kids we would do it with other Christians. The idea is to evangelise in community.  

This means that people who are good at getting to know others but have no idea how to bring up the gospel in a conversation needn't worry too much about that, because others in the group can do it.  But those who are confident teaching and talking about the Bible but have no idea how to meet people needn't worry about it because others in the group can do it.  It also means that we can see others doing the things we are not good at and get ideas on how to do it better.

The evangelism primarily takes place when the gospel is clearly articulated to a listening audience.  But in this model it also takes place as lives are shared and unbelievers witness believers living in community in ways that seem impossible in our culture with our structures and priorities.  

I'm going to keep writing about this stuff and maybe share some things as we seek to make what is now our Bible Study group into a gospel community where we share our  lives with each other sand the gospel with unbelievers.

I'm interested to hear from others, though, what they've experienced in terms of meaningful community and sharing the gospel.

When Helping Hurts

I've recently finished reading 'When Helping Hurts'.

It's about how to alleviate poverty without hurting the poor and ourselves in the process.
Its premise is basically that poverty in its different forms comes about from broken relationships. First, our broken relationship with God and then with each other.

There are a few points from the book that I found helpful.

1. All people are experiencing poverty of some kind.  That we're materially rich doesn't mean we're not spiritually or relationally poor.
2. Christians should respond to all kinds of poverty.
3. God has a special interest in and heart for the materially very poor.  If we are followers of Jesus then so must we.
4.  Giving relief (usually in the form of money) to people without putting in place development to stop their need for dependance almost always does more harm than good.
5. Short term mission trips should be done through organisations and shouldn't include doing for people what they can do for themselves.  The chapter on short term mission trips is extremely helpful and outlines how many short term mission trips are well intentioned, but ineffective and then goes on to say how they can work with bigger organisations that can mobilise people quickly to move into effective ministry work.  Mercy Ships is a prime example.
6. Poor people and communities usually need development, which is long term and difficult and requires real commitment.

This is a great book and whilst outlining lots of problems, it offers alternatives that the authors believe can benefit individuals and communities.

Church Should Be...?

The following is a post about what I think church should look like.  It's mostly from a comment I made here.

Basically, I think that the model of church we follow is pretty unhelpful and puts focus on the wrong things and neglects things that should be priorities for us.
I presume that there are churches out there that look more like this than the churches that I've experienced, and I'd love to hear about them.

We're too focused on Sunday services.  Sunday services are great, but I don't think that they should be the main goal of the local church.  I think that Sunday services should be a time for the larger body of the local church to meet together and build each other up and to welcome in new members of the fold.  It's a good time to sing together, to read  the Bible, to pray and to model things like confessions and affirming what we believe.  I think it should be seen as a time of fellowship with believers for believers, but it should also be broad enough in its scope to be welcoming to most, if not all believers.  When we focus our time and energy on the Sunday service we focus only on ourselves and neglect the mission to spread the gospel to the nations.  I think that Sunday services should be the ministry of as few as possible so that the ministry of as many people as possible can be focused on spreading the gospel.

I think that every committed Christian should be in a small group and that churches need to be telling serious Christians that if they are committed to serving God in their local church that they should seek to do so through such a group. These groups could be the base for small groups of Christians working together in the community to spread the gospel.  I think small groups should be like a family.  They should live close to each other, for convenience' sake, they should spend time together reading God's Word and praying.  They should share meals together to build friendship.  They should be constantly engaged in working together to tell others about Jesus.

This model sees the small group working together to drive the spread of the gospel and disciple the Christians in the group, and the local Sunday church service, then, exists to build up, support, encourage and unify these groups.

You still need pastors to oversee, teach and protect the flock. But I think we should give more responsibility to lay people who are often just as talented, committed and able to help out.  The main difference is that those committed lay people also have an actual job and so they have less time on their hands.

I think that at the moment church is a Sunday and Wednesday thing for most people.  This is a travesty. How we can possibly read the Bible and think that a level of commitment for about 4 hours a week is appropriate is beyond me. 

My suspicion is that, at the moment, there are very few Christian adults evangelising to non-Christian adults.  This is a tragedy. 

There are more and more people who don't even know the gospel and who haven't really had it explained to them even though they live right next to Christians.  That is, we have an ever increasing number of people in our communities who are unreached and know exactly enough about God to condemn them to Hell.  We have failed them and can't afford to continue to do so.

Church right now isn't working.  I'm basically up for trying anything except what we're doing right now.  What I've written is what I'd like to try, but I bet others have better ideas than me.

Gay Marriage

My family and I all got a very nasty flu, so I haven't gotten around to reading unconditional parenting yet, fyi.


Today on Sunrise, Kochy and Melissa Doyle made a stand in support of gay marriage. For what it's worth, I support gay marriage. Defacto relationships are given legal status in this country, and I believe homosexual couples should be given the same. Furthermore marriage has been removed from Christianity, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing. 


Here's my working definition of marriage:
A lifelong commitment to a single intimate relationship.


With divorce an option perhaps I should remove the word lifelong. And without some ethical framework against polygamy, I should probably remove the word single. This leaves:


A commitment to an intimate relationship.


It's not terribly meaningful, but I think this is what the general population mean when they use the word marriage. If that's the case, then why not admit gay marriage?


Christians are really hung up on this. We seem to want to make our own definitions. My definition of an appropriate intimate relationship under God is something like the first one I wrote down with the word heterosexual in it. However, when prodded, I have to admit that I think this includes the willingness to bring kids into the relationship, which some Christians don't agree with. And it is definitely lifelong in my book, which again many Christians don't adhere to. And there's a whole lot of stuff about laying down one's life as Christ did for the church, which I know a lot of Christians don't do (like me), and don't even try to do (unlike me). 


I'm confident that many homosexual couples tick many more boxes than a lot of 'Christians'. 


So my question is: in a secular society, on what basis do we fight against homosexual marriage? I can't think of a good one.

I received an email about this Sunrise stuff today, urging me to act. Something in the email which was repeated a few times, was that homosexual marriage robs children of the right to parents of both sexes. 


Now this I can stand behind, I think. On the one hand my previous arguments still apply, that there would be much worse heterosexual parents out there than most homosexual ones. But somehow I think you can make arguments based on nature. Homosexual couples cannot have children. Nature doesn't allow it. From an evolutionary point of view, I'd imagine there is a substantial part of our biological, emotional, and psychological development which is sex-specific. So while couples who can't conceive or go to term, but have a baby by IVF or similar, have been 'disallowed' by nature, the nature of things isn't against them, which is what an argument from nature is about. I think this is a strong argument. I don't know about the research, all I know is that any research I've ever come across about these sorts of things, it invariably becomes apparent that the natural order is vastly ideal because our evolution has made it that way. 


But is marriage necessarily linked to kids? It's not in my secular definition above...


Any thoughts?