Work in Progress

At the moment I’m working on a publication that I hope will see the light of day in the autumn this year. It’ll reflect the work I’ve been engaged in with the churches that linked themselves into the Imagine project. This is a short excerpt from the introduction….

For three years we worked with churches up and down the country, getting to know them well, trying to understand their particular challenges and opportunities, encouraging them to become whole-life disciple-making communities. From this experience we have been reminded that there are no silver bullets, no ‘off the peg’ resources that will change everything. Over three years later, we have learnt from our work with these partner churches.

What we have found is that there is a clear process that can be used by any church, regardless of their denominational stream, their age profile or their geographical location. Of course, what they end up doing will be unique to them in each situation. Each church is local and unique, and God has a way of dealing with each of them according to his plans and purposes.

But the simple process can be summarised in three points:

1. People need a new way of looking at the church. It’s the relationship between the gathered church (what we do when we are together) and the scattered church (what we do when we are separated from one another).

2. The whole church, but particularly the leadership, needs to be committed to actively listening to the situations that people face in their everyday lives.

3. There are some simple actions that can be taken that will make an ongoing difference to the culture of the church. In every church we worked with, they began to identify the things that made sense for them to do.

One church put a mirror on the church missionary noticeboard.

One church included the question ‘how are we doing at making disciples’ on the agenda of every leadership meeting.

One church included where people worked on the church address list.

These are small things. How much effort does it take to add a column to the church details but it’s a huge symbol that our life together as gathered church is about a much wider horizon than simply what happens in the church building. Can you imagine the conversations that ripple out – ‘did you know…’, ‘I didn’t know our church was doing that…’….

All of this can make it sound as though this is the easiest thing in the world to be involved with. And you need to know that it can be straightforward. But things keep changing: pastors leave, buildings become a problem, relationships are difficult and all the rest…. and there’s a church culture that is deeply engrained in doing things in acertain way that reflects their long-held values.

But we have seen that when this process is followed, people become liberated to see that the whole of their lives matter to God and churches see that when they are together they can not only support and celebrate what God is doing, but also see that other people’s imaginations are sparked.

We called the project IMAGINE. Not a bad name. Can you imagine if this was normal for the whole church? What might God do in and through us? Maybe the point is, we don’t know. But surely it’s worth finding out.

These stories are the stories of ordinary churches and ordinary people that we have worked alongside. These stories and many others like them have led us to believe that something significant can happen, and they have encouraged others to engage with us as well.

LICC has long believed that:
The UK will never be reached until we create open, authentic, learning and praying communities that are focussed on making whole-life disciples who take the opportunities to show and share the Gospel wherever they relate to people in their daily lives.

It’s clear: if whole life disciples are the answer to the missionary challenge, there is a need for whole-life disciple-making churches to emerge.