in the previous posts I was looking at ethically emaciated Christians and what might help to beef them up.
Stuart Heath gave a wonderful description of a week in the life of his church.
it raise the question of how would things be different if we restructured church to beef up ethically trained disciples of the Lord Jesus who are also missionally effective.
here it is:
In the church I’m in now (part of The Crowded House network in Sheffield), our primary locus of church is not a Sunday gathering, but small groups (15–20 people, though we’re looking at ways to make these smaller). The key differences I see between this and most of my church experience in Sydney is:
(a) it facilitates church as community, rather than event;
(b) it helps me know which Christians to love in deeper ways (i.e. I focus on building relationships and serving the people in my small group, rather than being overwhelmed by having a hundred people to ‘really get to know’), and it facilitates a level of trust which allows us to be open with one another about our sins and struggles (because we’re committed to one another in a concrete way);
(c) it gives an easy context for doing mission together. That is, in Sydney, my worlds were sealed off from one another — church friends, uni friends, work friends, family. In this church, the idea is to get those worlds colliding, so that people who don’t know Jesus get to see his people living together (serving one another, serving others together, resolving conflict in godly ways, raising children, discussing life decisions, and so on).
This is highly aspirational: our prayer is that it be rare for us to meet *without* unbelievers present, but we’re a long way from that so far! But we seem to be headed in the right direction. The geography of Sheffield makes it easier than Sydney — most of us live within ten minutes’ walk of one another; people don’t commute an hour to work. Having said that, a few people do live further away, and it’s not unusual for some of them to have ’sleepovers’ if we’re having dinner late, or something.
We have no regular times when the whole small group meets all together, though we put a Sunday lunch in diary for every 4–6 weeks where most people will be present. There are two fixed meetings that people come to if they’re available — every Wednesday morning we pray for half an hour before work; every other Monday evening we meet to read the Bible.
Our only ‘formal ministry’ is running a conversation class on Saturday mornings for asylum seekers and refugees. Our hope and prayer is to develop relationships with those people outside the conversation class, and this has been slow so far.
All other ‘meetings’ are ad hoc. Living close means lots of low-key contact (cups of tea and so on). The idea is not to do ‘extra events’, but just to include people in what you’re normally doing. For example, we’re planning to go to a jazz night at a pub on Wednesday; we’ve invited our non-Christian neighbour and some people from our small group to come along. I’ll give you an outline below of what the last week looked like for me. Other people were doing other things; we don’t have any children at this stage so we’re freer to be involved in a range of activities:
Sunday: church meeting in the morning, followed by lunch. Also had dinner together, where we discussed holiday plans/budgets. Out of that, a few of us are going on holiday together in June.
Monday: met after dinner to read the Bible; spoke about repentance; that conversation has been picked up throughout the week.
Tuesday: dinner with Indian (Hindu) friends, who’ve invited us to their place for dinner tonight
Wednesday: prayer/breakfast before work
Thursday: whole church network AGM in the evening
Friday: lunch with a Muslim asylum seeker newly arrived in Sheffield. Then birthday dinner together.
Saturday: conversation class, followed by lunch. Some people went on to an outdoor gig. Then dinner and film at our place (with one non-Christian friend, F). At dinner, we also discussed doing a charity auction for F. We’ll use the church building and people will donate stuff to auction.
Sunday: church meeting in the morning (I picked up someone else’s non-Christian friend on the way), followed by lunch. Two families in our group have twelve-year-old boys who aren’t interested in ‘Sunday school’. So during the church meeting, men from our group mentor them
Today: it’s a public holiday, so a few people are going out into the countryside for a ramble. There’ll be three non-Christian friends, including an asylum seeker
discuss?