Towards a different model of church mission

Steve Liggins’ post ‘An unsung evangelistic hero’ (4 July 2016) is a helpful piece that encourages us in the pressing need for reaching the lost. However, I cannot help wondering if it falls short in terms of the challenge and innovation we need to reach people in our current secularized and culturally diverse society.

There appears to be an implicit assumption foundational to most of our thinking about mission that needs challenging. Steve helpful reminds us of how powerful Christian community and genuine love and care can be. In a society where isolation and loneliness abound and where people crave real relationship (not just Facebook friends), as believers, we have something very attractive. When Christians display the fruit of the Spirit and have Christ dwelling richly among them, we adorn the gospel (Titus 2:10). However Steve’s two practical suggestions—try to attract people to your church (for example, for Christmas and Easter services) and try to get believers to go out and interact with your community as a group—still appear to have in mind an ‘attractional’ model for evangelism: we ‘attract’ people and draw them into our space to hear the message—most probably from a ‘professional’. Even as we encourage people to go out into the community to interact and display Christian relationships, it is done with an ultimate hope of making an invitation to church or perhaps to an evangelistic course that’s held most probably at church (or maybe in our home). Ultimately, we expect them to come in and join us (hopefully as new believers) in our wonderful Christian community. It is relational, but also ‘attractional’, event-based and ‘church and Sunday’-centric.

There is nothing especially wrong with this model. It has us served well in many places over many years, and many will testify to it being part of their journey to faith in Jesus. I wonder, however, if it will continue to work so well in the future in our current secularized and multicultural society. Masses of our city (in Sydney, Australia) are completely dislocated and alienated from our invariable ‘nice’ middle-class, literate, still predominately white European churches. At least 50 per cent of our city do not know a Christian person or have never darkened the doors of one of our churches (except for a wedding, baptism or funeral). It is an increasingly foreign and improbable cultural experience for them to do so. For millions across our city, Sunday is a day of sleep-ins, slow starts, socializing, sport and shopping. (And for too many, it’s a work day as well.) Gathering with people you hardly know for a few hours in an old building is, in contrast, not very attractive at all.

Another work is needed, which is harder: I wonder if we also need small Christian communities embedded out there in the community, living and displaying Christ. They could be in homes, pubs, clubs, sporting venues, community halls, surf clubs and coffee shops—Christian people living holy and Christ-like lives, adorning the gospel in word and deed in the hope of finding opportunities to speak of Jesus and see someone come to faith. They are, for all intents and purposes, ‘churches’—God’s people drawn by the Lord Jesus, gathering around his word, and responding in prayer and obedience and love. Any who take an interest or are attracted can join there, hear of Christ and be nurtured in the faith in those locations without ever having to join the main church to which those Christians belong. They could attend the larger church gathering in time, but perhaps they never will. If we think of a Muslim convert or someone from a background of major social disadvantage, the transition into one of our current fellowships might take years, such are the cultural barriers. Could we envisage a network of ‘sub-churches’—little fellowships linked to a parish or to a trained/equipped leader, reaching whole new demographics and subcultures in our city?

This raises the question, “What is the end game for a new convert?” Are we wanting every convert to end up sitting in the pews of one of our churches out there in the suburbs? Or is a small community of believers meeting around God’s word, responding in repentance and faith, and living out the life of faith together with other believers sufficient? In many parts of the world where the gospel has flourished, this is exactly the way church life is: these Christians rarely experience fellowship groups beyond a handful of other believers. Do we need to supplement our current thinking about church and mission with some ideas like this?

Paradoxically, do we need to ‘lift the bar’ on what we encourage some members to do in mission, rather than constantly lowering it? Do we need to encourage Christians to actually ‘do church’ in their home/sporting club/café/pub/workplace, rather than make the contact and then bring them in so the professional minister can complete the deal effectively? I am not arguing that small church is better than large, nor that our existing churches are not doing good things in reaching the lost. Nor am I calling for a ‘house church movement’. Rather, this is a call for some more creative and flexible ways to reach lost tribes in the ‘deserts’ of our city.

Let’s indeed utilize the power of relationships, community and Christian love. But let’s use these powerful tools resting on the power of the proclaimed word and the Spirit of God in some new ways—ways that take us out there in the world, rather than remaining in our safe spaces.