Changing the Culture

In this article, Alasdair Macleod, shares his thoughts on disciplemaking and his involvement with the Imagine Project. Alasdair is now the Senior Minister at Billericay Baptist Church, however, until a few months ago he was leader of Bushey Baptist Church which was part of the first Imagine pilot project. This article was previously published in the Baptist Times 'Crossing Places' Special Edition published 30th April 2010.

We are all longing to see the church in the UK grow. All too often we place the emphasis on adding converts to our churches without adding depth. Yet for growth to be sustained we must equip believers to live well for Christ in their frontlines of mission. This vision has been recognised by the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity (LICC) in their Imagine report, “The UK will never be reached until we create open, authentic, learning and praying communities that are focussed on making whole-life disciples who live and share the Gospel wherever they relate to people in their daily lives.”

Over the last 5 years I have been privileged to work alongside LICC at Bushey Baptist Church as we wrestled together with the challenge of changing the culture of the church to refocus on the biblical commission to make disciples (Matthew 28:19). In 2005 we were blessed with a steady stream of new converts into the church community. I prioritised on overseeing the Alpha course and nurturing new converts at the expense of the established home groups. As we considered how to strengthen the home groups we made our first contact with LICC. We came to understand that the home groups were not only essential for pastoral care but as the place where people could be equipped for whole life discipleship. We also realised a greater potential for other shapes of fellowship such as ‘one to one’ and triplets.

This was all happening at a difficult and painful time for the church internally. Consequently, the outward looking focus was a breath of fresh air and people were hungry for help in connecting their faith to the whole of life. A key moment was when a church member received a picture of a tree that looked from a distance as if it was dead but as one got closer there was new life inside the tree. We interpreted this as confirmation that our priority should be on discipleship and that something new was going to emerge. Over the next three years the culture, structures and leadership of the church changed with whole-life discipleship at the heart of our vision.

We worked closely with a church life consultant from LICC and piloted many helpful approaches and tools. Our vision was summarised as ‘being a signpost for Jesus in the local community and a seedbed for whole life-discipleship’. We held mid-week workshops in the spring term on two consecutive years which were very well attended. In the first year we gave the biblical basis for the vision and surveyed the congregation. The teaching on the comprehensive scope of God’s purpose and the value of our daily work to God was a paradigm shift for many. In the second year we focussed on the goals and practicalities of relational discipleship, and began to intentionally develop leaders. This bore fruit two years later when three young men joined the leadership team and we saw a doubling of participation in discipleship groups.

As the pastor I had to continually cast the vision and encourage the sharing of stories. We held a prayer meeting with staff in the local hospital; we visited church members in their places of work; we made space for testimonies about whole life issues in our services. An influential man testified that my visit to his workplace with specific literature about a persecuted minority was like a call from God to help his organisation refocus on that issue. Another highlight was praying for a postman in the middle of an industrial dispute.

The main benefit of this process was helping us to make a clear link between discipleship and mission. This incarnational approach to mission assumes that opportunities to share Jesus will arise naturally. However, unless the end goal of reaching people for Christ is kept at the forefront discipleship could be diminished to merely building up the individual.

I had a golden opportunity to share this passion for disciple-making with a missionary edge when I ‘preached with a view’ from Acts 2:42 at Billericay Baptist Church. The early church was a learning, praying, loving community that gave a visible and authentic expression of the life of Jesus to the community beyond. In this new church I am asking once again how our discipleship is flowing outwards into mission?