Turning the church inside-out: shaping and tooling up your church for the real task
(Listen to the talk here part 1 - part 2 - part 3 - part 4 - part 5)
Church growth without really trying
About 9% of people in Britain are registered as blind or visually impaired. Ask one of these people what they can see and very few will tell you that they see nothing –most blind people can see something; they may see only a small segment of their visual field, they may see everything off to the left, they may see light and dark. Very few people indeed are black-blind. I think this is a great metaphor for spiritual blindness; very fiew people are spiritually black-blind, most can see something!
Sharing your faith is about finding out what your friends can see, and describing to them what they can’t see.
How did the first Christians go about this? An intriguing pattern emerges in Luke’s account of their story. Let’s look:
Acts 6:7 “So the word of God spread…”
Acts 9:31 “The church … strengthened… grew”
Acts 12:24 “The word of God … spread”
Acts 16:5 “The churches… strengthened… grew”
Acts 19:20 “The word… spread widely”
As the word of God spreads, the churches grow; as the churches grow the word of God spreads… clearly, we need to create the conditions in which the word of God influences more and more people. That is what makes the church grow.
When I lived in Bournemouth I grew pretty close to a wonderful local vicar, a scholar and, for a short time, took me under his wing. When I began working at Knighton Free Evangelical Church in Leicester he came to preach at my induction service. His message was entitled; “Church growth without really trying”. He was encouraging the church to stick to the core activities described in the New Testament; if we did this then the church would grow, without our really trying.
You can describe these core activities neatly as ‘the four W’s’ – Word, Worship, Welcome and Witness. If you do these well, you church will grow, almost without trying. Actually, if you only get two or three of them right you church will probably grow.
This is what evangelicals do, and our churches grow (usually) and we don’t really have to try.
But what if we really try?
What if we are really prepared to turn our church inside-out to bring the influence of the word of God ot as many people as possible? We will still do the four W’s – but things would look very different!
Let’s start with Welcome
Welcome starts at the church door, people arrive and receive a warm handshake from a man on the door, just inside a friendly lady gives you a hymnbook and shows you to your seat. What if we turned our churches welcome inside out… what if people felt our welcome before they ever even thought of coming into our church in the first place?
When we arrived at Bethany Christian Centre eight years ago we were faced with this problem – to the folks in Houghton le Spring we were an alien spacecraft that had landed in their town. How were we to begin building a relationship with the community? We had this idea that we wanted to become the town’s parish church (mind you, I never used this phrase, I had lunch with the local vicar once a week and didn’t want to upset him!) It wasn’t long before opportunities emerged.
At several points of our local schools RE curriculum they need to visit a church, meet practicing Christians and see how a church works. I began to see a vision; “What if every school-kid in Houghton visited Bethany at least twice, once in primary and once in secondary?” That excited me because in ten years time every adult in the town would have visited the church. So our schools team was born.
A little thing we have done for years: storing furniture and white goods for local people in need. We have given washing machines to single mums, three piece suites to asylum seekers, and an entire wardrobe of clothes to a family that was illegally evicted from their home.
Did you know that the gospel has two legs, not just one? Remember Jesus’ words:
Matthew 5:13-16
Salt was a first century metaphor for wisdom – we carry the words of wisdom the world so desperately needs. Light is obvious – it is a metaphor for our good deeds. Through the centuries the church has insisted on amputating one of the gospel’s legs. Some churches amputate the word – Christianity is about being a good person. Other churches amputate the deeds – Christianity is about telling people what God says. A one legged gospel does not go very far; it has to hop!
The gospel has two legs. Our good deeds in the community make people feel welcome long before they make a decision to come to church. What are you doing in your community to make the light of Christ obvious?
If your gospel has two legs, people will feel welcome long before you ever see them in church.
Evangelical churches can no longer afford to be an alien presence in their communities. They need to take the place of their local parish church. The challenge is to turn the church inside out by holding you community close – get involved and stay involved. Become visible and stay visible.
Worship – church for people who don’t go to church
Christian worship can be a powerful evangelistic tool. We have some of the world’s greatest poetry set to some of the world’s best tunes! I am a preacher but I have come to believe that the quality of your worship team and its leaders is as important as the quality of you preaching and teaching.
Now what if you turned your church inside out so that your worship is accessible to those who don’t go to church; entry level worship?
You see, our worship can be a barrier – Christians are passionate about their chosen style of worship – but if our worship is designed to indulge the saints it will usually deter the sinners. Some of us are naturally traditional in our tastes, others are much more experimental. It doesn’t matter what we are as long as our worship is designed to be comprehensible to people who don’t usually go to church.
But remember this; we are seeking to be a church which is enjoyable for those who do not go to church. When people come to us on a Sunday, they are half expecting churchy things to happen. All we need to do is ensure that our meetings are well designed and the participants are well briefed – in my experience, once you actually get an individual into a half-decent worship service, they are delighted and want to come back.
Some ideas might help:
- If your services last more than an hour and a quarter the chances are that people will not want to return – less is more!
- Use mostly modern songs – they are easy for under 50’s to sing and learn. My generation regards syncopation as a majority occupation across the nation.
- Don’t ignore the classic hymns – my mother was a ‘seeker’ until recently and she used to breathe a sigh of relief when we sang a song she recognized!
- Be creative – try out new ideas. “This time tomorrow” – one of our folks telling us what they are doing at work the next day – is one of our most popular regular items.
- Practice everything – the readings, interviews, music, preaching – everything!
If you really want to turn your church inside out, you will have to learn to plan worship that will hit two targets and engage both Christians and those who are not yet Christians. It is a challenge, but it can be done.
Word – one edge of the sword
If worship sets the scene, preaching tells the story. We need to rediscover a passion for preaching, it really does work. So what if we turned the church inside out so that every message is relevant and easily understood by those who are not yet Christian? Can I give you some more ideas?
- Be ruthless about relevance. We live in culture that is intolerant of irrelevance – if you are not relevant people will tune out and you will never get them back.
- Be visual and vivid – you don’t need pictures to be visual because stories paint mental pictures for people. Preachers need to be story collectors and story tellers
- Less is more – If I go on for more than 25 minutes there are people in our church who start loosing the will to live! Thirty minutes is a maximum.
- Use PowerPoint wisely! Do you know the real usefulness of PowerPoint (apart from the odd diagram or photograph)? It is this, however scintillating you are, however much your preaching sparkles like morning sunlight on a lake, people are going to tune out! Your PowerPoint slide is there so that when they tune back in they know what you are talking about; that’s all! Don’t overdo PowerPoint. And please make sure you use a minimum of a 30 point font! (9% of Britons are visually impaired).
- Preaching needs a large investment of time in preparation (John Stott reckons about half an hour for every five minutes in the sermon) – don’t stint this time.
- Preaching is a gift, some people have it and others don’t. Prune the preaching team down to those who are gifted. Give the rookies smaller groups to address until you are sure they can hack it in a congregation with lots of guests.
- Less really is more – a lot of our folks at Bethany see it as a sign of spirituality if the service goes on forever. Does the Lord really want us to sing ten songs and listen to a 55 minute message, or would he prefer our not-yet-Christian friends to come back next week? I believe I know the answer to that with a great deal of certainty! Less really is more.
Witness – the other edge of the sword
By now many of you will be asking the question, “He is talking as though our main job is to get people into the church – aren’t we meant to go out and relate to people where they are? Why don’t we turn the church inside-out by going to where people are?” That is right; our Welcome needs to be outside the church. The two legged gospel takes us outside the church and into the community. Our Witness takes us there too.
Every church that is passionate about evangelism agonises over the question of how to get outside in the world and meet people. This often drives us to do things that our English friends find utterly excruciating, knocking on doors, accosting people in the street, preaching on street corners. People do not want to have these things done to them!
There is a better way – most people in your church have more friends, relations, workmates and school acquaintances than they know what to do with. This is their ready-made sphere of witness. If we want to turn the church inside out then we will give our people the tools they need to work these networks for the gospel.
Actually, some of us don’t need tools, we need permission! Start by giving people permission to enjoy time with other human beings! We are ambassadors for Christ, well an ambassador is, more than anything else a socialite – and it is very enjoyable!
Most evangelism training courses are too high pressure. The thought of getting into an eyeball to eyeball conversation about the gospel fills most Christians with fear. So what do we do… terrify them even more with another course? No, we give our friends something they can do… something within their ability.
- Tell them to go and mix with people – to enjoy their company. Everyone loves that!
- Encourage them to pray for their friends. Everyone can do that.
- Help them to find low-cringe ways of letting people know that they are a Christian, that they go to church. That is more of a challenge, but how can you help? There is a lovely verse in the little letter of Jude in the New Testament – this is it in the Living Bible: “Always remain within the circle where God’s love can reach and bless you” (Jude 21) we need to throw more parties! Get people into the circle; help them meet our Christian friends. This helps quiet believers to make their faith known.
- Encourage everyone to prepare their story – how you became a Christian and how your life has changed since in less than a minute. There is a great Willow Creek resource on this called, Walk across the room.
Waiting for the breakthrough
Maybe we will see revival in our time, maybe we ought to pray for it, long for it. But I am suspicious of Christians who retreat into pietism and wait for God to do it all when he has left so much to us! It looks like laziness to me!
I think that my old mentor, the one who spoke about church growth without really trying would be mildly horrified at this pro-active and intentional approach to evangelism and church growth – he would prefer to see the church grow without really trying.You may feel the same – it is right to distrust human methods and rely on God.
But it is wrong to wait passively for something to turn up as our society sinks into post-Christian darkness.
It is wrong to shirk our responsibility and retreat into pietism waiting for the magic bullet of revival to rescue our nation.
It is wrong to bury our talent in the hope that God will make it multiply all by itself, when he has already spoken of his approval of the hardworking servants who earn him a return for his investment by putting their talents to work.