Imagine

Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert on Mission and Social Justice

2011-09-08T11:25:00.002+01:00

Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert, What Is the Mission of the Church? Making Sense of Social Justice, Shalom, and the Great Commission (Wheaton: Crossway, 2011), 288pp., ISBN 9781433526909.

Although I’m pretty certain I won’t want to say everything the way they say it, I’ve had this new book from Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert on pre-order for several months now, and am really looking forward to looking at it more closely.

A generous excerpt from the book is available here.

And here is the publisher’s description:

‘Social justice and mission are hot topics today: there’s a wonderful resurgence of motivated Christians passionate about spreading the gospel and caring for the needs of others. But in our zeal to get sharing and serving, many are unclear on gospel and mission. Yes, we are called to spend ourselves for the sake of others, but what is the church’s unique priority as it engages the world?

‘DeYoung and Gilbert write to help Christians “articulate and live out their views on the mission of the church in ways that are theologically faithful, exegetically careful, and personally sustainable.” Looking at the Bible’s teaching on evangelism, social justice, and shalom, they explore the what, why, and how of the church’s mission. From defining “mission”, to examining key passages on social justice and their application, to setting our efforts in the context of God’s rule, DeYoung and Gilbert bring a wise, studied perspective to the missional conversation.

‘Readers in all spheres of ministry will grow in their understanding of the mission of the church and gain a renewed sense of urgency for Jesus’ call to preach the Word and make disciples.’

A twelve-minute video available here – featuring the two authors and Ryan Kelly – also provides a flavour of what to expect.

William Carey

2011-08-17T15:18:00.001+01:00

William Carey, so-called father of modern mission, was born this day (17 August) in 1761 – 250 years ago.

Sunday 21 August 2011 has been designated as ‘Carey Sunday’, endorsed by the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Baptist Union of Scotland and the Baptist Union of Wales. BMS World Mission has a number of helpful resources here to help churches celebrate the 250th anniversary of Carey’s birth.

As a young Christian, I devoured biographies of William Carey, and I recall doing a short series on his life for 8- to 11-year-olds in my Sunday School class, trying to finish each week on a cliff-hanger!

I also recall, even as a young teenager, being intrigued about what appeared to be some major flaws in his domestic life as well as being fascinated by all his activities I wouldn’t necessarily have associated (at that stage in my life) with ‘mission’ – in agriculture and botany, in founding schools and a college, in campaigning against Sati (the practice of widow burning), in publishing a newspaper, etc.

In fact, a few weeks ago I came across a nice piece here by Vishal and Ruth Mangalwadi, imagining a quizmaster at the finals of the All India Universities competition asking the best-informed Indian students, ‘Who was William Carey?’, with the many different answers embracing him being a botanist, industrialist, economist, medical humanitarian, medical pioneer, agriculturalist, translator and educator, astronomer, library pioneer, forest conservationist, crusader for women’s rights, public servant, moral reformer, and cultural cultural transformer. The Mangalwadis conclude that ‘Carey was an evangelist who used every available medium to illumine every dark facet of Indian life with the light of truth’, and that ‘as such, he is the central character in the story of India’s modernization’.

The line perhaps most often associated with Carey – ‘Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God’ – remains theologically rich as well as ripe for reflection on practice.

Paul Beasley-Murray on Salty Christians

2011-07-27T20:47:00.003+01:00

Paul Beasley-Murray, ‘Salty Christians’, Ministry Today 3 (1995).

Okay, I think the title might make a bit too much of the reference in Matthew 5:13, but this is a terrific article (from a paper first presented to a Baptist Assembly Seminar at Bridlington, on 27 April 1994) which resonates with many of our concerns here at the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity.

Beasley-Murray lists some of the ways we keep the salt in the salt cellar, essentially keeping people in the religious ghetto of the church – by our preaching, our teaching on stewarship, the activities we lay on and expect people to attend, our concept of mission, and because the ‘close identification of many a ministerial ego with many a church has created a psychological need to emphasise the church over the kingdom’.

Then, more positively, he writes about ‘mobilising salty Christians’ – through preaching and teaching, in the leading of public worship, in decision-making meetings, in Bible studies, in support groups for particular occupational groups, in running a stewardship campaign with a difference, in running church membership classes differently, and in giving people time to live in the real world.

Lots and lots of practical wisdom, much of which still bears repeating.

Mission Frontiers

2011-07-22T10:23:00.003+01:00

Mission Frontiers is billed as ‘the news and issues journal from the U.S. Center for World Mission’. Themed issues are published and available online very two months, with the following being among the more-recent ones:

July-August 2011 – Overcoming Poverty

May-June 2011 – Jesus Movements

March-April 2011 – Church Planting Movements

January-February 2011 – Discipleship Revolution

November-December 2010 – Going Radical

Matt Chandler, Michael Horton, and Tim Keller on the Church in Culture

2011-07-08T11:21:00.001+01:00

For those who are following, or even vaguely aware of, the ongoing debates about the role of the church in culture – especially the lines being drawn in the sand between so-called ‘Two Kingdoms’ advocates on one side and so-called ‘Cultural Transformationists’ on the other side – this is a really useful 10-minute trialogue between Matt Chandler, Michael Horton, and Tim Keller.

Keller begins by asking: ‘What’s the church’s role in culture?’

To make it more granular, he asks: ‘What is the church’s job in equipping its members to carry out their callings in the world?’

In line with his recent published work on the gospel and the great commission, Horton speaks about culture (in this context) being about the ‘myriad callings’ we have as husbands, fathers, plumbers, teachers, etc., rooted in creation. But, he says, we have another calling in the great commission. Here, he deploys a distinction influenced by Kuyper between the church as an ‘organisation’ and the church as an ‘organism’. As an organisation or an institution, the church (for Horton) doesn’t have any calling to transform culture; but in terms of being an organism, the church as a people is scattered into the world to pursue their callings.

Chandler speaks about the mission of the church being ‘to proclaim the good news and make disciples’. But part of that process, he says, is training and releasing Christians to be faithful in their domains of society, to empower them to see themselves in their neighbourhood, hobby, workplace, etc. – the ‘units they do life in’ – as being a faithful presence and witness in those areas. Disciplemaking needs to go beyond emparting knowledge.

Keller judges that there is probably not much difference between the practice of Horton and Chandler. He says he hears them saying the same thing but not wanting to say it the same way. It’s not the church’s role, as the church, to change the social structures, but to equip the people to make a difference. Keller muses that it’s not the job of the pastor to lead a church to change a culture but to create a culture-changing people.

10 minutes well spent.

Derek Christensen on Equipping the Lay Mission Force

2011-07-05T15:51:00.000+01:00

Here’s a short but powerful essay which echoes a lot of our concerns here at Imagine...

Derek Christensen, ‘Equipping the Lay Mission Force’, Momentum 2, 2 (2007), 129-34.

He begins with the ‘scattering‘ of the missionary church in Acts 8:1-4 and 11:19-24, pointing out the vital role that ‘lay’ people have continued to exercise in the history of the church, right up to recent times. Even so, as he says, while there has been ‘a great deal of writing on lay involvement... the truth is, it’s not happening’.

The bulk of the article is then taken up with an expansion of five reasons for a lack of lay involvement and five possible courses of action to take, as follows:

Five reasons for a lack of lay involvement:

1. The dominance of a professional leadership model of church life.

2. Continued focus on ‘come’ instead of ‘go’ strategies.

3. Related to this is the fact we leave most of our people with a gaping chasm between Sunday and Monday.

4. Failure to achieve a theology of culture that handles the dialogue between church and culture in ways that resonate with both people of the culture and people within the church.

5. Failure to fully resolve the church-academy divide.

Five possible courses of action for renewal in lay education:

1. Change our expectations of the role of the lay person.

2. Establish a seamless range of training opportunities for the whole people of God.

3. This implies a greater emphasis on the reflective practitioner.

4. Have as watchwords for our training three words: appropriateness, assessment and access.

5. Learn to see training of the lay mission force as a long term, lifelong task instead of short term and detached experiences.

Anvil

2011-06-16T21:37:00.002+01:00

Anvil – ‘an Anglican Evangelical journal for theology and mission’ – has been relaunched as an online journal.

New material is available for free (following a pain-free registration process), and in time it is hoped that the whole Anvil archive will be available online.

According to the website:

‘Anvil is an Anglican evangelical journal of theology and mission. It aims to encourage clear and creative thinking and practice in theology and mission, through open, scholarly debate. While the journal stands clearly in an Anglican evangelical tradition, it seeks to engage constructively with other other Christian traditions both within and beyond the Anglican Communion. Anvil has a particular concern to reflect the unity and diversity of the church worldwide.’

Issue 27, 1 (2011) is available here. In addition to book reviews, it contains the following articles on the theme of ‘Fresh Expressions’:

Jonny Baker

Curating Worship

Drawing on many years involvement in ‘alternative worship’ and in particular on interviews for his recent book Curating Worship, Jonny Baker offers reflections on worship as curation and highlights a number of key themes arising from this creative liturgical and missional movement that are of value for the wider church.

Graham Cray

For the Parish by Andrew Davison and Alison Milbank – A Response

In their recent book, For the Parish, Andrew Davison and Alison Milbank offer a strong critique of Fresh Expressions and Mission-Shaped Church. In this response, Bishop Graham Cray highlights and responds to six of their criticisms, arguing they seriously mislead and misrepresent both the report and Fresh Expressions. He identifies contrasting approaches to the gospel and culture as underlying many of the differences before noting three areas of shared concerns.

George Lings

Evaluating Fresh Expressions of Church

One of the big questions we face today, particularly in relation to Fresh Expressions, is what we mean by ‘church’. In this article George Lings provides us with an overview and some critique of a number of existing lists and criteria on offer to evaluate church. He then explores in more detail the additional question of what it means for a church to be Christian, offering four distinctive characteristics. Finally, he critically explores the deeper question of our image of church and tracks four paradigm changes in this over recent years before concluding with a reflection on how the interpersonal paradigm can combine with the distinctively Christian features of church to assist in evaluating fresh expressions.

Eleanor Williams

Urban Fresh Expressions: Sustainability in the Mixed Economy

Drawing on parish experience and on research interviews conducted in preparation for a written project on the viability of Fresh Expressions of Church in urban deprived settings, Eleanor Williams surveys the findings of the research, drawing out key insights. She concludes by raising some challenging questions about the sustainability of new forms of church at the margins of society, and the meaning of the concept of ‘mixed economy’.

Select articles from earlier issues of Anvil are available here.

Brian Stanley on a Vision for Mission

2011-06-08T16:43:00.002+01:00

The text of the 2011 G.R. Beasley-Murray Lecture, delivered by Brian Stanley (Professor of World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh) at the 2011 Baptist Assembly in Blackpool, is available here.

Its title is ‘Renewing a Vision for Mission among British Baptists: Historical Perspectives and Theological Reflections’.

Stanley does a nice job, in my opinion, of weaving together historical discussion with theological reflection around the topic of mission, under three main points:

• Rediscovering the missionary purpose of God

• Restoring the centrality of missionary discipleship

• Re-envisioning the shape of missionary fellowship

Here are some highlights:

‘[B]y “renewing a vision for mission” I mean, not simply expanding and deepening our commitment to evangelism within Britain, but, more fundamentally, bringing into the very centre of our church life a passionate absorption with the theme of God’s missionary purposes for the world’ (1-2).

‘The mission of God is an overflowing of the incessant dance of selfgiving in relationship... which characterizes the inner life of the triune God, into the community of the people of God, and from them into the world’ (6).

‘The missionary responsibility of the church is to make not converts, but disciples whose communal life together will be a visible embodiment of “all that I have commanded you” – in other words, the mind of Christ and the values of his kingdom. Hence the church as a missionary community is called to be what Lesslie Newbigin loved to refer to as “the hermeneutic of the gospel”, an icon or exemplification of what the gospel of the kingdom is all about’ (9).

Lausanne World Pulse (June-July 2011)

2011-06-01T10:21:00.000+01:00

The themed articles in June-July 2011’s Lausanne World Pulse are devoted to ‘the power of discipleship’.

Sara Singleton

The Gospel within Discipleship: Spiritual Formation

God calls us to learn, listen, and to live in the light as we grow to be his disciples and disciplers of others. The change that comes from the renewal of our inner life leads to an irrepressible love for God and others.

LaNette Thompson

Discipleship at Arm’s Length? Not Possible

Cross-cultural discipleship should include mentoring in four areas – purpose, relationship, knowledge, and rituals and powers.

Knud Jørgensen

Discipleship: Shallow Lake or Deep Waters? A Nordic Look at Church

A life without discipleship will always be a life without Jesus – an idea, a myth, a folk religion, without Christ as the center. The author discusses how this plays out in Western Europe and calls for a church that both supports people (gives to, takes care, welcomes, carries) and challenges people to discipleship and obedience.

The Executive Summary is available here, and the full version here.

Church Attendance Survey

2011-05-31T14:38:00.002+01:00

Dr Lisa Oakley, a friend of the Institute, from Manchester Metropolitan University is running a valuable new survey exploring people's experiences of church. We are happy to point people to the website where they can add their reflections. Lisa gives more information here:

Church – the good, the bad and the ugly.

Church and church attendance is a central part of the lives of many Christians in the UK. It is important therefore for us to understand how people experience church. The ‘church experience survey’ has been launched to collect views on the best and worst about church. It is aimed at anyone who attends or has attended church in their lives. All results are anonymous so no one can be identified.

As well as general questions about positive and negative aspects of church life it asks some searching questions which we need to know the answers to in order to understand more about church and to allow us to think about ways in which we may need to rethink or develop our churches. It also allows individuals to celebrate the things which are good about churches across the UK whilst asking about issues which have been difficult for us to discuss. The on-line survey only takes 5 mins to complete and can be found at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/V9K36YP

Catherine Playoust on Gathering and Scattering

2011-05-24T10:30:00.001+01:00

Catherine Playoust, ‘A Time to Scatter, a Time to Gather’, Pacifica 23, 1 (2010), 1-14.

One of our leitmotifs at London Institute for Contemporary Christianity is the distinction between the church as ‘gathered’ (coming together as one body for worship, teaching, sacraments, etc.) and ‘scattered’ (in the various places we find ourselves during the week). While both aspects are crucial and interdependent, ecclesiology can tend to focus on the former to the neglect of the latter.

So, I was interested to see this article (available from here) by Catherine Playoust devoted to the theme of scattering and gathering. She does a nice job of summarising the main uses of this image in Scripture itself:

‘In deciding what to include, I didn’t go in search of particular Greek or Hebrew words, but looked for places in which these ideas came up. They emerged in three main contexts, often interlocking: the sowing of seed to produce a harvest that will be gathered in; the dispersal of a multitude and its subsequent restoration to its own land; and the assembly of a group for a particular occasion, after which the members of the assembly are sent out to various places with the group’s goals in mind’ (2).

A brief exploration of these gives way to a more extended look at the gospel of John, where she notes that ‘instead of the crucifixion being the time of scattering and sorrow, to be followed by gathering and joy at the resurrection, the gathering and joy happen already at the crucifixion’ (11).

Missional Journal 5, 2 (May 2011)

2011-05-19T10:59:00.001+01:00

After more than a decade of analysis about the missional church, David Dunbar asks (in his latest Missional Journal), ‘Where’s the beef?’

On reasons for the seeming lack of ‘concrete results’, Dunbar begins by citing the ‘residual influences of Christendom’:

‘Although the cultural situation in much of North America may now be described as post-Christendom, many remnants of Christendom are still with us... not least in the thinking and practice of many Christians. Thus many of us assume a building-centered approach to church, ministry, and evangelism. We assume that we can speak and act from a position of cultural favor and influence. And we remain deeply shaped by a clergy-laity distinction that was powerfully rooted and formed in Christendom (even though the beginning of the distinction predates Constantine).’

Change is only likely to come about, he says, by ‘regular and repeated teaching around the themes like the mission of God, the gospel of the kingdom, and the sending of the church’, by missional leaders finding ‘congregational allies – “early adopters” who will share the vision for mission and help them hold course in the face of opposition or discouragement’, and by reaching out to ‘other congregations on the same journey for wisdom, encouragement, and partnership’.

He also suggests there has been ‘an absence of models available to help churches think concretely about what it might look like follow Jesus into the world and how leaders could actually process congregations through this change’.

In addition is the challenge of formation, the fact that ‘missionally focused churches face the same problems that other groups do: forming mature disciples is a tough row upstream’.

He concludes:

‘Missional is not just another program for busy people – it is a divine call to be a different kind of people, a people formed by the gospel to embody the gospel in the totality of their daily lives. That’s where the beef is! And this is the challenge before us – it will require time, energy, wisdom, and focus to move the theoretical discussion to incarnational reality.’

Tim Chester on Eating and Drinking with Others

2011-05-10T14:45:00.001+01:00

Tim Chester, A Meal with Jesus: Discovering Grace, Community, and Mission around the Table (Wheaton: Crossway, 2011), 144pp., ISBN 9781433521362.

IVP are publishing this in the UK. Meanwhile – to whet the appetite – Crossway make available an excerpt as well as an interview with Tim Chester around the topic of the book. It’s about the significance of eating with others – in the ministry of Jesus (particularly as portrayed in Luke’s gospel) and as part of the shared life and mission of Christian communities today.

Here are some paragraphs from the Introduction:

‘This is a book about meals. But the meals of Jesus are a window into his message of grace and the way it defines his community and its mission. So this book is about grace, church, and mission. But meals are more than metaphor. They embody God’s grace and so give form to community and mission. We can’t get away from meals.

‘If I pull down books on mission and church planting from my shelves, I can read about contextualization, evangelism matrices, postmodern apologetics, and cultural hermeneutics. I can look at diagrams that tell me how people can be converted or discover the steps required to plant a church. It all sounds impressive, cutting edge, and sophisticated. But this is how Luke describes Jesus’s mission strategy: “The Son of Man came eating and drinking.”’

After the Introduction, the book is divided into six chapters, looking at meal scenes in Luke:

1. Meals as Enacted Grace: Luke 5

2. Meals as Enacted Community: Luke 7

3. Meals as Enacted Hope: Luke 9

4. Meals as Enacted Mission: Luke 14

5. Meals as Enacted Salvation: Luke 22

6. Meals as Enacted Promise: Luke 24

Aliens and Strangers

2011-03-09T16:47:00.000Z

An interesting article has been published in the latest Missional Journal from Biblical Seminary which picks up on some important thinking from Miroslav Volf and James Davison Hunter on the mode of Christian living in the world and the need for disciples of Christ to operate in a mode of Soft Difference.

Read the article here...

Baptist Times: Whole-life Discipleship (Feb 2011)

2011-02-17T14:40:00.003Z

A Vision for Discipleship
Albert drives buses. He’s passionate about serving people, extending those courtesies that make life easier – waiting for the person who’s still running to the stop; exercising patience with those who’ve lost theirs. He’s also bothered about the other drivers in the depot. When I met him he was about to return to work following a short strike during which only five drivers had crossed the picket line. ‘My job tomorrow,’ he said, ‘is to be a peacemaker. That’s why I’m here.’ Albert has a vision to make a difference in his place of work. Quietly spoken, with a sense of humour, a diplomat and a good listener, Albert deploys that gifting by actively engaging with the relational tensions of his workplace. Along the way he hopes to drive lots of people safely from A to B, enable as many as possible to experience grace through his attention to their needs, and to speak about Jesus as the one who inspires his vision for a life worth living.

What about you? What’s shaping your vision for your own life?

One of the ways we might approach this question is to take seriously the places where we spend most of our time. That’s what Jesus did. John 1:14 tells us that Jesus “came and lived among them…” In other words he came to live in a fixed time and place. It mattered where he was. This was the context in which he could fulfil his unique and specific life calling in obedience to his Father.

Jesus was sent to a tiny geographic area on our planet for a limited amount of time, but with a purpose. He came to seek and to save the lost. He came to model an alternative way of life and relationships. He came to declare by word and deed that the kingdom of God had come. He ate
and drank, he taught and healed, he talked and cried, he worked and slept, he prayed and celebrated. He lived fully and purposefully in that moment and in that place and he invited his disciples to do likewise.

Where we are matters. Where we spend the majority of our time in an ordinary week matters to God. So where is that for you - work, home, college, in your community, or somewhere else? Can you make a difference there? On the ‘frontline’ in daily life, in your ‘crossing places’ with non believers?

The Message translation of Galatians 6:4 puts the challenge succinctly,

‘Make a careful exploration of who you are and the work you have been given, and then sink yourself into that.’

God weaves the threads of our life, our self and our context into a tapestry that displays the wonder of his mission as we ask questions and listen, bring him our dilemmas, search the Scriptures, and exercise boldness in words and deeds on the frontline.

It’s easy to be overly swayed by other people’s expectations or intimidated by the brilliance of other people’s gifting. Allowing such forces to mould us can lead to bitterness or resentment or a growing sense of inadequacy. The truth is: you are one in whom Christ dwells and in whom he delights, his masterpiece (Ephesians 2:10), a reflection of the heart and the mind and the creative genius of the Maker. We’re not all called to be diplomats or drivers. But through our gifting and our growth in Christ-likeness on the frontline we will make a difference wherever we are day by day. So what’s your vision for your discipleship these days?

Tracy Cotterell

Hirsch & Ford: Right Here, Right Now

2011-02-02T10:50:00.001Z

The ever prolific South African missiologist Alan Hirsch has published his latest book Right Here, Right Now: Everyday Mission for Everyday People co-authored with Lance Ford and we are looking forward to reading it. The book seeks to be an exploration of whole-life discipleship, a corrective to the often overlooked element of the missional church conversation: that missional communities need to be made up of missional people.

As the authors put it:

This book is written to equip all believers and to serve as a guide in the journey of living as salt and light in the name of Jesus Christ, regardless of situation, vocation or location. It is to take the academic concept of missional and make it accessible to the whole body of Christ. We believe it belongs to the whole church and must somehow be factored into the equation of discipleship, spirituality, and church at every level of our experience if we are going to be the people God has made us to be.

The book is accompanied by an excellent range of online resources at righthererightnowbook.com

Baptist Times: Whole-life Discipleship (Article 2)

2011-01-11T14:08:00.000Z

LICC has been asked to contribute a series of articles to the Baptist Times exploring themes in whole-life discipleship. In the second of the series Mark Greene explores a vision for human flourishing...

Flourishing from Eden to Exeter
Here’s a question:

Why does God create Adam on Day 6? Why doesn’t he create him on Day 1?

And what has that to do with whole-life discipleship?

Well, if God had created Adam on Day 1 it would have been dark and there would have been nowhere for him to stand.

In fact, by the time God creates Adam everything is ready for him. There’s air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat, productive work to pursue and it’s beautiful. What has God done? He has created a context for human flourishing. That’s the big project.

That’s what a parent or a single person is trying to do in their home – trying to create a context for the flourishing of those who live and visit. That’s what a good manager does in a company, tries to create a context in which people can flourish. As one senior manager put it; “My job is to roll the rocks off the runway so other people can soar.” That’s what a pastor is trying to do in a church, trying to create a context in which people can flourish in Christ.

Certainly the Fall has made that more difficult but God’s primary purpose has not changed. Christ, after all, is not only described as co-creator of all things: “For by him all things were created” (Colossians 1:16)

He is described as the one through whom “all things” are reconciled:

“and through him to reconcile all things to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” (Colossians 1:20)

All things, not just some things.

This is the wonder and glory of God’s plan in Christ – not a partial salvation, not an interim solution, but a definitive, once and for all, all sufficient, redemptive sacrifice that promises the utter renewal of all things.

Tony Campolo, the American Christian social activist, put it this way,

“Evangelism is an invitation to join a movement to change the world.”

Of course, evangelism is more than that, but it is never less.

This is the big project we are all involved in – working with God to create a context for human flourishing in Him, with him, for Him, to His glory… wherever we are, day by day.

That may sound all very academic but it works out in very concrete ways, in ordinary situations.

So, a while back, a scientist called Anita pondered the lack of positive relationships in her workplace. Every day, the “team” would come in, suit up in white and scurry like moles into the single-person labs that the purity of their research required. Occasionally one of them would scuttle out to replenish a coffee cup and then scamper back. No one talked to each other, no one shared ideas about the research, no one really had much fun. So Anita decided to do an experiment and announced that on Friday, she would make coffee for everyone at 10:30 and she would bring chocolate biscuits.

And so it was that, on Friday at 10:30, the scientists, lured by chocolate, scampered out of their single-unit labs, into Anita’s benevolent conversational trap. And talked about life, about the news, and, of course, about their research. And so Friday by Friday, calorie by calorie, the “team” became more of a team.

What might you do in your context to combat something that inhibits people flourishing? Is your context full of gossip? Then practice affirmation. Is it full of selfishness? Then suggest something that helps people think of others – getting together to give to a particular charity, for example. In sum, prayerfully, look for an antidote that might, over time, lead to people experiencing Jesus’ ways. As God puts it to the exiles in Babylon (Jeremiah 29:7): “Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”

Chick Yuill's New Book Released Jan 2011

2010-12-21T09:00:00.006Z

Too many people find their experience as Christians incomplete and unsatisfactory...

Jamal enjoys his voluntary work with down-and-outs but finds church irrelevant.

Jack believes he's going to heaven but isn't sure what difference Jesus makes to him now.

Aimee loves being part of a lively church but at work no-one would know she was a Christian.

They're all missing something. But life with Jesus is meant to be an all-encompassing adventure. In this dynamic and punchy book Chick Yuill explores the four concentric circles that make up the authentic Christian life:

walking in the company of Jesus
growing in the community of believers
engaging with the culture of the times
looking to the coming of the King

Moving in the Right Circles is published by IVP in January, 2011. Read the prologue here... or order a copy here...

Location, Location, Location - Tracy Cotterell

2010-12-16T14:58:00.002Z

Tracy was recently asked to write an article for the CPAS Church Leadership magazine and they have given us permission to reproduce the article here.
CL73 p6-7

Baptist Times: Whole-life Discipleship

2010-12-08T14:49:00.002Z

LICC has been asked to contribute a series of articles to the Baptist Times exploring themes in whole-life discipleship. In the first of the series Mark Greene looks at a surprising example of faith in action on the Frontline...

Where you are, as in heaven?
Imagine you are a ten year old in a primary school, specifically at Holy Trinity C of E Primary School in Northwood where I live. Imagine that your whole school is going to be discussing what its values should be and voting for them. Now, although the school is a Church of England school there are lots of Muslims and Hindus and people with no particular faith at all.

How in a multicultural context can you inject some overtly Christian component without imposing on others in your community who don’t share that faith perspective?

How do you influence corporate culture – when you are ten years old?

So you get together with two or three other Christians and you think about it and pray about it. And you summon up your courage and you go to the head teacher and say “We think one of our values should be, ‘What would Jesus do.’” And so the head talks to the Muslims. And they don’t mind because for them Jesus is a prophet and she talks to the Hindus and they decide that it’s Ok because after all this is a Christian school. And then the whole school votes and it’s agree that WWJD should become one of the school’s values, one of the criteria by which everything that happens in that school should be evaluated… And they are 10 years old.

Was it easier, I wonder, or more difficult for Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in Babylon to make an impact on their bit of God’s world? Is it easier or more difficult for you or me in our workplaces, clubs, towns, villages? Or have you or I perhaps already done it?

Is this too small a tale to tell, I wonder, of how the life of Jesus so courses through a ten year old that they want to see his name high and lifted up… as indeed it then was, for all to see, on a paper elephant head on the walls of their school hall?

Those children understood something very simple. This was the place that God had put them, these were the people he’d placed them amongst, this was the place to bring his love. This was where his name was to be hallowed, this was where his will should be done, this was where his kingdom should come…

The question for us is this: can we too discover the radical possibility of the authentic, adventurous, awe-inspired, agape fuelled ordinary Christian life? In a time when evangelical Christians across the denominations are struggling to see how the Gospel of the crucified and risen Lord really makes a difference in everyday life, can we, like these schoolchildren, be clear on our calling in the places we are called to live and work?

We think that Christians can. In this series we’ll be telling you more stories about what happens when people realise that they are called to make a difference where they are; we’ll be exploring the kind of church that inspires and trains people like this and the kind of full-orbed biblical understanding of God that shapes, inspires and sustains such actions.

Indeed, this vision springs directly from the Gospel, from an understanding that Jesus is creator of all, owner of all, reconciler of all, Lord of all and that therefore there is no aspect of our being, no context we find ourselves in, no task we undertake that is not of interest to him. So the new life we have in him is intended to flow out beyond our Sunday services and our midweek meetings into the whole of life, the whole of our ordinary life - our life at work, our life at home and our life in the neighbourhood, our life in the playground and our life in the classroom.

May the Lord indeed be with you this week wherever you are.

The Great Divide - Mark Greene

2010-10-28T10:08:00.001+01:00

A brand new resource from LICC, in which Mark Greene, outlines the greatest challenge to the Church today and what we can do about it.

In this essay, Mark explores the stifling, pervasive, life-denying impact of the sacred-secular divide on Christian mission and living, and reveals how overcoming it can expand our vision, inspire our mission, release our churches, broaden our minds, enlarge our hearts, nourish our souls, thrill our spirits, free our imaginations for faithful following and fruitful living in all of life.

Read a short extract from The Great Divide.

To order copies from the online LICC bookshop click here or call 020 7399 9555.

Imagine Project: Next Steps

2010-10-27T12:26:00.001+01:00

In this short new video, Neil Hudson outlines some of the next steps for the Imagine project over the coming months. Now that the Pilot Project is finished, how is the work developing?

Lausanne 2010: People at Work

2010-10-22T13:14:00.000+01:00

LICC's Executive Director, Mark Greene's address to the Lausanne Conference this week was very warmly received. His talk 'The Theology of Work - Creation, Cross and Conusmation' is now available to watch online. In the allotted 15 minutes, Mark manages to cover a lot of ground exploring the impact of the Sacred-Secular Divide and underlining the place of work in God's purposes in time and eternity.

Gospel Shaped Discipleship - Antony Billington Mp3 (1)

2010-10-21T10:13:00.001+01:00

The first of LICC's Head of Theology Antony Billington's lectures on Gospel Shaped Discipleship is now available to listen to and download here.

In this talk, entitled 'Beginning with the Gospel', Antony sets out the shape and scope of the series and explores the implications for discipleship through our understanding of the gospel in four areas:

Good News from God
Good News about Jesus
Good News of Salvation
Good News for Life

Download the lecture outline and PowerPoint slides.

Lecture Programme
20th October - Engaging with the Word
3rd November - Belonging to the Church
10th November - Walking with the Lord
24th November - Living in the World
1st December - Standing in God's Grace

Lectures run 1.00pm-1.50pm, with the option to stay on for discussion afterwards. For more details and to book a place click here.

Lausanne 2010: Christian Discipleship and Mission in the Age of Globalisation

2010-10-15T11:39:00.000+01:00

The Lausanne Conference on World Evangelisation begins in Cape Town next week, gathering 4,000 leaders from over 200 countries and LICC's Director Mark Greene will be attending on behalf of the organisation. This promises to be an important moment and it has been interesting reading a number of the advance papers leading up to the event.

Particularly stimulating from our point of view is the article by Os Guinness and David Wells, 'Global Gospel, Global Era: Christian Discipleship and Mission in the Age of Globalisation'. The article explores the challenges and opportunities for mission and discipleship in our globalised world and in a clear and succinct manner, outlining a range of cultural forces and challenges to mission in both the micro and macro spheres:

The Political Temptation
Plausibility Crisis
The Downsides of the Age of Communication
The Lethal Effect of Secularization
The Midas Touch of Consumerism
The Idol of Chronological Timeliness
The Pressure of the Movement of Movements
Creating and Contributing rather than Critiquing and Complaining

The article draws to its conclusion with the noteworthy comment (at least from Imagine's perspective) that:

Evangelism in the global era appears easier, and in many ways it truly is, but discipleship is unquestionably harder, and so too is costly incarnational evangelism that is patterned on the life and death of Jesus rather than on the brilliance of modern insights and techniques.

Tracy Cotterell - CPAS Leadership Insights

2010-10-13T10:17:00.000+01:00

Tracy Cotterell, LICC's Chief Operating Officer was recently interviewed by James Lawrence from the leadership organisation CPAS. The interview explored discipleship, leadership and the significance of high-quality tea-brewing!

CPAS has made this interview available as a free podcast which you can listen to or download here.

Imagine Videos

2010-10-05T14:10:00.009+01:00

One of the resources on the Imagine section of the website are a series of short (and rough) videos which introduce core ideas from the project. As they are somewhat buried within our current website we thought it might be useful to post them here as well.

10-110

Circles of Life

1267

View the videos on the website here...

Celebrating Vocation in Worship

2010-10-04T12:27:00.003+01:00

It's great when you know there are allies in the cause of wholelife discipleship. The Alban Institute in the States has proven itself to be one such ally.

This is well worth a read - we'd want to say, 'Amen, amen, amen'!

http://www.alban.org/conversation.aspx?id=9254

Jonathan Lunde on Following Jesus

2010-09-30T09:30:00.001+01:00

Jonathan Lunde, Following Jesus, the Servant King: A Biblical Theology of Covenantal Discipleship, Biblical Theology for Life (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, forthcoming 2010), 320pp., ISBN 9780310286165.

Lunde’s book will be the second volume released in Zondervan’s ‘Biblical Theology for Life’ series (the first by Chris Wright on The Mission of God’s People is already out).

A short excerpt of this one is available here, which includes the table of contents. It looks as if the main theological drivers in Lunde’s discussion of discipleship are covenant (its grace and its demands) and christology (Jesus as the Servant King).

Equip to Disciple

2010-09-29T14:14:00.002+01:00

Equip to Disciple is a useful quarterly publication, produced by CEP (Christian Education and Publications), an agency of the Presbyterian Church in America.

CEP describes itself as seeking ‘to glorify God by equipping, training, and encouraging believers, particularly leaders and teachers to make a difference by proactively living redemptive Christian lives and making disciples in the Kingdom of God by:

1. knowing the Lord,

2. knowing and obeying the Word,

3. knowing the world,

4. knowing themselves,

with a commitment to understand and interpret the truth in different cultural settings from a biblically reformed worldview that enables them to serve the Lord with a global vision by: penetrating this generation with the prophetic presentation of the Gospel, building strong relationships through which Christ builds His church, extending the Kingdom of God in every area of life and equipping people for actual ministry.’

Archived copies of Equip to Disciple are available here.

Whole Life Discipleship is not new!

2010-09-14T14:40:00.003+01:00

A recent article by Gene Veith recalls us to the Reformation concept of vocation. Interesting that the emphases on scripture and justification by faith became so central for Protestants, whereas the equally significant call for people to recognise their whole lives as vocational got lost, or at least limited to the church ministry or the caring and teaching professions. The article has some great quotable sections: 'Vocation is nothing less than the theology of the Christian life. It provides the blueprint for how Christians are to live in the world and to influence their cultures. It is the key to strong marriages and effective parenting. According to the classic Protestant theologians, our multiple vocations—in the family, the culture, and the workplace—are where sanctification and discipleship happen.' Yes, yes, yes

WITH vs FOR God

2010-09-14T10:44:00.001+01:00

This short but thought provoking video by Skye Jethani, editor of Leadership Journal and the Out of Ur blog, was posted last week. Jethani looks at the difference between a faith that is lived FOR God and a faith that is lived WITH God. It is a subtle but crucial difference and as I was watching it I wondered if what Jethani is giving is a descriptor of whole-life discipleship that avoids a works-based activism. Living as whole-life disciples, we seek to consciously live our lives with and before God in all we do.

How do you respond to what he is sharing?

Keys to Success and Barriers to Growth (3 of 3)

2010-09-10T10:30:00.003+01:00

After a short break for the summer holiday, we return with the third in our series exploring learnings for churches from the Imagine Pilot Project. Here we summarize a number of issues that churches we have worked with have faced that are around the question of process.

We have always sought to be clear with churches that Imagine outlines a process for churches to follow rather than a programme. In other words, this is not a tightly defined, one size fits all approach, but churches can follow a series of steps at their own pace and employing their own creativity.

Briefly outlined there are three phases to the process that we have walked through with churches:

Discover a new way of looking at the church – spend time considering the connection between the gathered and the scattered modes of the church. To support this and stimulate imagination we have provided the two Imagine magazines and the Imagine DVD.
Engage in active listening – for this we have given churches a survey which allows them to hear the issues their members on the Frontline and begins a dialogue in the congregation around this question.
Make a number of simple actions (one degree shifts) that signal a new way of being as a congregation and that seek to honour the Frontline and enhance the connections.

Simple as this process is, in practice the churches we have worked with have encountered a number of natural challenges which means that this process isn’t necessarily as smooth or as easy as it may appear. The most common of these have been:

Losing momentum
Changing too much too quickly is not often a problem for churches! No, the challenge has often been to implement changes clearly, regularly and tangibly enough for people to see the difference that is being made and to ensure that momentum is not lost.

It is a real danger for churches if the process appears to have stalled. Expectations of change can be very real in the congregation once they have completed the survey and can lead to discontent if issues have been shared but not responded to – churches therefore can’t stall too long.
Now, we are far from advocating a leap into mindless activism, but we are suggesting that changes need to be clearly made and communicated. To this end we have suggested to leadership teams that changes be focussed on one particular area of church life at a time (beginning perhaps with the Sunday morning) over a clearly defined period rather than being so diverse that it is difficult for people to see how changes cohere and make a difference.

The advantages of cementing changes in one area at a time have been clearly felt all round. It helps those in the congregation see what is happening and engage with the process. Also, it helps those leading the process as they will be able to clearly see what difference their decisions are having, celebrate what works and be encouraged to go further.

Losing Attention
The second challenge is that of distraction. Churches, like any organisational structure will always have issues that seek to draw attention and energy away from the core focus. The main issues the churches we have been working with have faced centred on the building, finance and relationships. All these things have the potential for derailing the process.

It was in this issue that the role of the church consultant was crucial, as an external voice, Neil was an ongoing reminder to churches that helped them keep on track. One of the questions that we continue to grapple with is how can other churches find similar external voices that will help them keep focussed on what they have started?

However, the reality is that we will always face such distractions and there will never be a ‘good’ time when we can escape such issues and turn our attention to the question of whole-life discipleship. The question is, can we define such issues as potential distractions and, if we must engage with them, seek to handle them in a way that strengthens the whole-life message rather than distracts from it?

Building, finance and relationships are life issues as well as church issues. Can we engage with what we do as a church gathered in a way that helps people discover new imagination for the building, finance and relational issues they will encounter in life?

Losing Centrality
This is rather inelegantly phrased, but what I’m trying to get at here is the temptation for churches to turn whole-life discipleship into an add-on. We can think that, for example, if we set up a work group and a family group etc. we have dealt with whole-life discipleship. However, as we conceive it, whole-life discipleship cannot be confined to a special interest activity for enthusiasts.

Whilst whole-life discipleship will mean engaging in new activities, of equal, if not greater importance is seeing this emphasis fed into every sphere of church life as it already exists: preaching, coffee time, small groups, worship, local mission activities, administration etc. etc. Only in this way will the culture of the church begin to change. So we need to be constantly vigilant to how we can feed this emphasis into these streams of church life and breathe new life into what already exists, for it is these elements that often contain the strong default which will prevent a whole-life culture truly emerging.

Losing proportion
Finally, we must remember that becoming a whole-life disciplemaking church is first and foremost God’s work. If we truly believe that this is something on His heart for the Church, we accompany him in this work and it is not just down to our own energy and ingenuity.

May this motivate us when we are tempted to turn the call to become a whole-life disciplemaking community into a manageable task – something that we define and around which we set tight boundaries. May it also reenergise us when it feels like an uphill struggle, that change will come and God’s people, through His church, will be released into fruitful life on the Frontline.

Chris Wright on the Mission of God’s People

2010-09-09T15:53:00.003+01:00

Christopher J.H. Wright, The Mission of God’s People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission, Biblical Theology for Life (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), 304pp., ISBN 9780310291121.

Zondervan provide a pdf excerpt (here) of Chris Wright’s latest book. The chapter titles are below, but the excerpt includes a detailed table of contents (as well as the first chapter) which whets the appetite for what is clearly going to be an excellent book.

Queuing the Questions

1. Who Are We and What Are We Here For?

Arriving at Answers

2. People Who Know the Story They Are Part Of
3. People Who Care for Creation
4. People Who Are a Blessing to the Nations
5. People Who Walk in God’s Way
6. People Who Are Redeemed for Redemptive Living
7. People Who Represent God to the World
8. People Who Attract Others to God

Interlude – Pause for Thought

9. People Who Know the One Living God and Saviour
10. People Who Bear Witness to the Living God
11. People Who Proclaim the Gospel of Christ
12. People Who Send and Are Sent
13. People Who Live and Work in the Public Square
14. People Who Praise and Pray

Reflecting on Relevance

15. The Journey So Far and the Journey Ahead

Event: Antony Billington on Gospel-Shaped Discipleship

2010-09-08T15:49:00.000+01:00

LICC's Head of Theology, Antony Billington, will be delivering a six lecture series on 'Gospel Shaped Discipleship' at LICC this autumn.

This series explores key facets of what this looks like for Christians and churches today - introducing some core theological themes at the heart of a gospel-shaped perspective on discipleship.

Lectures run 1.00pm-1.50pm, with the option to stay on for discussion afterwards.

Wednesday 13 October 2010: Beginning with the Gospel

Wednesday 20 October 2010: Engaging with the Word
Wednesday 3 November 2010: Belonging to the Church
Wednesday 10 November 2010: Walking with the Lord
Wednesday 24 November 2010: Living in the World
Wednesday 1 December 2010: Standing in God's Grace

Single lectures cost £5, or pay £10 for three, or £18 for the series of six.

Book here.

Keys to Success and Barriers to Growth (2 of 3)

2010-08-18T15:02:00.006+01:00

In this series we are exploring some of the learnings for churches from the Imagine Pilot Project. In the first post we looked at a number of problems with perspective. Here we explore a second dimension:

Problems with Participation
Addressing the issue of participation we look at a set of issues encountered by churches around who should be involved in the process of becoming a whole-life disciplemaking community. Often this means changing a number of our preconceptions about who should be involved and how to go about it.

1) Thinking we know the solution
Old and established methods will not enable us to resolve the question of how to release people as whole-life disciples. Few leaders have received the appropriate training that leads to the effective release of people into their callings and we must recognise that much of what we have been taught emerges out of a church-centric rather than a mission-centric mindset. Further, we cannot depend upon a pastoral response to the issues people face on the Frontline, as Hendrik Kraemer put it:

…the laity should not be seen primarily as the needy, ignorant and helpless, but as that part of the Church that has to carry the brunt of the burden of encounter with the world in and around themselves, and to voice and incarnate the Church’s or better, Christ’s relevance to the whole range of human life.

So as leaders, we must begin by acknowledging that we don’t have all the answers. We have to begin by respecting the wisdom of the body and recognising that we are not the experts about problems faced on the Frontline. This leads to a redefinition of the role of the leader. As Mark Gibbs and Ralph Morton put it in their book God’s Frozen People:

The essential job of a minister is not to do something for me but to help me do something by myself: not to pray for me but to help me pray, not to worship in my name but to help me offer my worship with the worship of the Church. As a member of the Church I am not a patient or a client or one whose absence will help things most.

To fulfil this role of accompanier, we must learn to listen and listen well to the Frontline and the issues emerging from that context it is this that will allow new wisdom and ways forward to emerge.

2) Thinking it is solely a leadership issue
It is sometimes tempting for both the leaders and the wider community to treat the move to becoming a whole-life disciplemaking community as a leadership responsibility. Leaders perform a significant function in managing the transition and it is crucial to have the leadership team on board. However, the call is one that must be embraced by the whole community. It can not be accomplished by the leaders alone.

To this end we try to encourage leadership teams to share as much with their communities as possible. For example, when we encourage churches to survey their congregation about ‘How whole-life is your church?’ we try to emphasise that the responses be shared with and discussed by the community as a whole. Each member of the church needs to take a degree of responsibility for this call to the community and own it. In the words of Jürgen Moltmann:

This is a call for the church to stand up and say we are the church.

3) Thinking some Frontlines are more significant than others
It is easy for us to act in ways that reinforce the perception that some people are in more significant contexts than others. So, we might think that white-collar businessmen are in really significant contexts, or perhaps doctors are really significant. However, the call to whole-life discipleship, is also the call to a community to realise that no-one is out of action, all are made significant in the purposes of God whatever their standing in the community.

Indeed, some of the most creative and powerful work we have seen churches engage in has been in equipping schoolchildren and teenagers, at one end of the spectrum, and older and retired people, at the other, to embrace their call as whole-life disciples. Often it is these groups, often marginalised by society, who embrace the call to the Frontline with the greatest eagerness and energy.

4) Thinking there is no cost
At the heart of WLD is a hugely liberating message that where people are really matters, but it also entails a cost that both members and leaders must recognise and be willing to make.

The cost for members is to choose to engage. It is now not enough to leave the hard work up to the leaders. Church members are on the playing field not on the benches. Overcoming the sacred-secular divide means embracing the hard spaces of life as contexts of discipleship and mission and that is far from an easy calling.

However, as has been indicated above, there is also a cost for leaders. Exploring whole-life discipleship means a willingness to see your role redefined, but it also means giving up some of your space and visibility, as you give space and visibility to others in your congregation by giving them opportunities to speak or share. In this way authority is redistributed and redefined. As Davida Crabtree put it in her book The Empowering Church: How One Congregation Supports Lay People's Ministries in the World:

I use my authority as little as possible. I believe the Holy Spirit is calling every ordained minister beyond timidity and beyond control into a new life lived in rich relationship with those who are called the laity. I try to enable the group to claim its authority. It is a deeply spiritual process.

The Missional Church...Simple

2010-08-17T15:19:00.002+01:00

There are some ideas you just whish you'd had first, like this excellent 2 minute introduction to the missional church...enjoy!

Baptism and the Whole-life Disciple

2010-08-11T08:55:00.001+01:00

When do we become a whole-life disciple? What fuels our discipleship? I'd like to suggest that our identity and comissioning as a disciple is firmly rooted in our baptism. There is much more to say about this and hopefully we will explore it further elsewhere, but I recently came across this quote by the Swiss theologian Hans-Ruedi Weber from his article The Ministry of the Laity - Reconsidered from an Old Testament Perspective that helpfully encapsulates this idea. He writes:

a) Baptism is the ordination of the laity which authorises them to participate in Christ’s ministry in and for the world. Baptism is therefore the starting point for a theology on the laity.
b) Baptism introduces each church member into a basic apostolic succession. Just as each apostle is called, so each member of the apostolic Church is called to discipleship and mission.
c) In baptism each Christian becomes the responsible steward of the gifts of grace, the ‘charismata’ which have been given to him. These ‘charismata’ have to be used both for the up-building of the Church and for Christian service in and through the ‘secular’ jobs of the church members.
d) In baptism, each member of the Church is introduced into the dying and uprising with Christ, who, as the eternal High Priest, offered himself to become the victim for the salvation of the world.
From their baptism onwards, all Christians are therefore called to share in Christ’s priestly work by offering themselves in love and obedience to God and in love and service of men.

Keys to Success and Barriers to Growth (1 of 3)

2010-08-03T16:52:00.004+01:00

In an earlier series we explored 5 values for a whole-life disciplemaking church. Now, based on our experience with the Imagine Pilot Project, I’d like to give space to exploring some of the keys to success and barriers to growth in becoming a whole-life community. We start by exploring the barriers.

From experience we know the sobering reality:

In some places whole-life discipleship will flourish
In many places it will not flourish as much as it could do

This is not easy work. Becoming a church that seeks to equip its members for the whole of life is a slow, long term process. Often it takes a long time of concerted effort to begin to see green shoots of change and churches encounter many challenges and distractions as they make the journey.

So, can we identify the barriers that get in the way?

From what we have observed through the pilot project, we think there are three areas of challenge:

Problems with Perspective
Problems with Participation
Problems with Process

Over the next three posts we will explore each of these areas in turn, but we begin by looking at problems with perspective. The challenges that arise in the way whole-life discipleship is understood.

Problems with Perspective:

1. Forgetting it is an urgent question
Whole-life discipleship can become something that is endlessly interesting for church leadership teams and groups to talk about. We can debate the ways in which we might equip people, reflect on the question of the characteristics of a whole-life disciple, and brainstorm creative approaches. However, churches need to be fundamentally convinced that the equipping of the people of God as disciples on the Frontline is urgent for the continuing mission and vitality of the church in the 21st Century. There is a serious issue in the life of the church today, the membership of churches is reducing, and people are struggling to present a coherent and credible witness amidst multiple overwhelmings. Therefore this is a question that needs to be addressed now rather than put off. And it needs to be addressed where you are and not just elsewhere.

Consequently, the equipping of the people of God is not, to quote Hendrik Kraemer in his Theology of the Laity, just an ‘interesting intermezzo in the Church’s realm of discourse.’ Rather, a church leadership team need to be gripped by this vision. As Bishop Graham Cray put it:

Churches have to recognise that the core of their calling is to be disciplemaking communities, whatever else they do.

Situations where whole-life discipleship remains an interesting rather than an urgent question are contexts where this call has failed to take root properly. To see this as an urgent question is not to say we need to go about it in a frantic manner without due consideration. We need to practice what Jim Kotter termed Urgent Patience – acting each day with a sense of purpose but with a realistic sense of time seeking to embed coherent changes in line with the new vision.

2. Forgetting it is a vision question
So what is this new vision? Well, whole-life discipleship is not about finding new ways of doing church better. It isn’t about discovering new, clever or creative ideas. Nor is it about helping tired, busy people discover new ways of living. (Although we hope it will embrace these aspects.)

Fundamentally, what we are talking about when we talk about whole-life discipleship is a new vision of the lordship of Christ manifest in all of life.

This vision underpins all we do. What we are trying to encourage churches to do is help their members discover what naming Jesus Christ as Lord of All practically means, so that ‘whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.’ (Colossians 3:17) It is a clear grasp of this vision that will fuel change that lasts. (For more on unpacking the question of Lordship, click here.)

3. Forgetting it is a mission question

Connected to the vision question, is the need to remember that whole-life discipleship is fundamentally a mission question. The central question we are constantly asking is, how can we accompany God in His mission to reach this nation?

This means churches need to be clear in focussing on this work as a mission question and not just a pastoral question. Our hope is to enable people to not only survive on their Frontlines but thrive, to make a difference. Consequently, we retain our pastoral concern, but do not seek to separate it from our missional concern. Indeed, this should enlarge our vision of pastoral care – it isn’t just about patching people up. Rather, the pastoral element of our work gains new dimensions as we encourage people to engage well in mission on the Frontline.

4. Forgetting the power of the default

Finally, churches struggle when they forget the power of the Sacred-Secular divide. The sacred-secular divide, that sees some things as really important to God and others as not, is alive and well in our churches, in church members and in us. We need to ‘keep the enemy in mind.’ Engaging in this work is not done in a neutral context. Rather as we seek to become a whole-life disciplemaking community we are actively fighting against a mindset that seeks to drastically limit the scope of people’s imagination and vision of how God might use them.

The Evangelisation of the UK: LICC/Imagine Research (3 of 3)

2010-07-30T13:13:00.003+01:00

This is the third in a series summarising the findings of LICC Imagine research 2003-2010. In this post we look at research conducted amongst leaders identifying the key issues they are facing as they look to equip the people for mission. Read the first and second posts.

Leadership toward Evangelisation
Connected to the question of the equipping of the people, explored in the last post, is the question of the equipping of the leaders, those who release the people into evangelism. A number of issues emerged from What the Leaders Said (2004) a consultation event with 150 Christian leaders, the Spring Harvest Apprentice ’09 survey (2009) and the Imagine Pilot Project (2007-10).

Overall, it is clear that: 1) leaders are struggling as much, if not in some cases more than, as their congregations to discover a way of living that manifests the difference the gospel can make, 2) the ‘pastor’-centric model of church actively mitigates against an equipping for mission (the role of leaders is limited to that of care-provider rather than equipper), 3) there is a perceived tension between the demands of keeping the church running and releasing members into life.

a) The Struggle of Paid Leadership
Leaders are displaying significant levels of struggle with home/work balance (68%), time pressure (66%), long hours (57%) and stress (47%). In addition, leaders are experiencing high levels of conflict (35%). In these areas leaders are struggling more than many in their congregations.

b) Coping Not Conquering
Pastors frequesntly identified their struggle with the fact that people like the security of being pastored and did not want to ‘get out into the world.’ Church was a place to help them cope, not ‘conquer’.

c) Pastors Need Resourcing
High levels of fatigue, guilt and discouragement mitigate against change.

d) Training
Leadership training has not necessarily equipped leaders to know how to set a direction towards whole-life Christian living, align their resources, or envision and equip their churches for disciple-making.

e) Programme Driven Mentality
Many leaders commented on how easy it was to become programme driven rather than mission driven, to look for security in church structures, programmes, plans and vision statements, and neglecting the capacity of the transforming power of the Holy Spirit in the lives of ordinary Christians.

f) The Practical Enskilling of Leaders
Only 47% of people in any form of leadership capacity and 71% of paid leaders know how to lead someone to Christ. Only 41% of people in any form of leadership capacity and 65% of paid leaders know how to help someone grow as new believers.

g) Equipping for Life Not Recruiting for the Centre
The challenge of ‘keeping the show going’ is experienced in tension with the real need to equip people for life.

William Diehl - Seven Suggestions for Pastors

2010-07-29T09:57:00.000+01:00

I've recently been reading William E. Diehl's book Ministry in Daily Life: A Practical Guide for Congregations (New York: Alban, 1996). Diehl worked as a management consultant and became a key figure in the workplace and ministry in daily life movement in America during the 80s/90s. He wrote prolifically in this period, even producing a book called Thank God It's Monday! (good title for a book!). Most of Diehl's books are now out of print but you can still find them if you search on Amazon.

The book Ministry in Daily Life is an important one for us as it tells the story of how the congregation of which Diehl was a part, the Lutheran Church of the Holy Spirit in Emmaus, Pennsylvania made the transition to supporting its members for ministry in the places they spent the majority of their time. (For those of you interested in seeing how sustainable this work of culture shift is over the long term, it is well worth checking out the Lutheran Church of the Holy Spirit website to see what has become of that work today.)

There are a lot of important observations that Diehl makes in this short book and it will be a source that we return to in the future, however for today I thought it would be worth sharing the list of 7 suggestions that Diehl makes for pastors involved in this work. He begins by asking 'If we focus on the church, primarily through its laity, ministering to the world, what should a parish pastor be doing?' This is his list of suggestions:

1. Be a believer. Truly believe that the church is to minister in the world and that the laity have been called to do that. If you can't believe in this, then stop reading here.

2. Listen. Ask your members to tell you what they do in their daily routines. Once they believe you are truly interested, they will tell you. People love to talk about their daily work. Listen to their stories and remember them.

3. Affirm, affirm, affirm. By the grace of God, your members are already in the mission field doing the things their God-given talents have best prepared them to do. Affirm that their work is important to God. Affirm that they have a ministry. And do it over and over again. They have been raised by a church that told them only you were the minister. So you need to preach again and again that their work matters to God.

4. Be patient. Remember what you are about is a radical change for people. It will take time for them to recognise their ministries. Don't be surprised or discouraged if they don't respond with eagerness. After all, being a passive pew sitter and not troubling one's mind about faith is a very comfortable way to practice religion. You are asking them to begin a religious life that is infinitely more difficult - and scarier.

5. Equip. Together with them find the ways they can best carry the Gospel into the world. Help them to make the connections between Sunday and the rest of the week. Help them to help each other.

6. Nourish. Make sure the word you preach, the sacraments they receive, and the worship they experience each Sunday will nourish them for the week to come.

7. Support. Help them create their own support groups. You don't have to do it. Just give them the vision and resources. (p70)

Jesus the Discernment Artist

2010-07-26T11:43:00.000+01:00

We are convinced that discernment is a crucial skill for disciples on the Frontline, it was therefore with great interest that I read these posts on John Frye's blog Jesus the Radical Pastor. In his most recent series he is exploring some of the dimensions of discernment from a New Testament perspective:

Assumptions Behind the Movement for MDL

2010-07-23T09:24:00.003+01:00

The excellent Urbana website, produced by the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, has a fascinating list of 15 Assumptions Behind the Movement for Ministry in Daily Life or Whole-life Discipleship as we would term it:

1. God has a purpose for the life of each human being.
2. The primary "calling" or ministry for most laity is in the world not in the church.
3. Many laity are undeveloped in relating their faith to daily life.
4. The primary task of the congregation is to develop mature disciples for ministry in the world.
5. For the most part, congregations do not take seriously the worldly vocation of their members.
6. The current model of ordained ministry is overly individualistic and competitive.
7. Clergy must be re-oriented to be more concerned about authority and less about control in the life of the congregation.
8. The church has been seduced by the compulsive careerism and consumerism of the present culture.
9. A change in the culture, the priorities, and the reward and recognition systems of the congregation is needed.
10. A change in the culture, the priorities, and the reward and recognition systems of the denominations is needed.
11. A change in the process for incorporating new members is needed to address the meaning of discipleship in a hostile pagan culture.
12. Laity must learn how to incarnate and articulate their faith in a non-imperial manner in a pluralistic society.
13. Appropriate small groups can provide support for lay ministry in the world.
14. Regional judicatory staff can play a useful role in assisting the reinventing of congregations for a new mission frontier.
15. Regional judicatories must place more emphasis on facilitating local initiatives
and less on functioning as a regulatory agency.

As you read through the list think through your responses where do you agree or disagree? Is there anything you would add?

Pastors, go to work

2010-07-21T19:15:00.004+01:00

There might be some translation needed from the different context, but this post about church leaders visiting people at work strikes me as good advice. Particularly the advice not to introduce yourself as a church leader - let people find out that you're a normal human and a church leader. Come to think of it there's a few assumptions there as well ;)

But worth a look: www.buzzardblog.com/2010/07/14/go-to-where-your-men-work/

Who's Shaping You? 21st Century Disciples

2010-07-20T15:06:00.004+01:00

The prolific Bishop Graham Cray's latest book Who's Shaping You: 21st Century Disciples has just been published by Cell UK priced at a very reasonable £4.25. An edited version of the talks Graham Cray has been delivering in partnership with LICC across the UK, the book explores 4 foundational issues for disciples of Christ.

The publisher writes:

Graham gives us an exciting theological vision to help us work out our foundations for living this life. He describes a radical way of life, based on blblical thinking which he sees is necessary if we are to impact our world. He encourages us to allow Jesus to infect the whole of our lives and to live those lives openly in front of those we come across day by day.

Order a copy of the book from Cell UK here.

The CD version of the talks is available here.

Update from the North-West - Chick Yuill

2010-07-09T12:15:00.005+01:00

Some of my best friends - the kind who know me well enough to tell me what they really think - have sometimes suggested to me that I might occasionally suffer from delusions of grandeur! I’d always thought they were joking until I took up the post of - wait for it - North West Regional Church Life Consultant for the Imagine Project. It’s worth getting out of bed in the morning for a title like that! My mates might have been right after all...

Seriously, it’s a great job which requires me to get involved with individual local congregations, clusters of churches in the same geographical area, and denominational groupings. And my role is simply to help them make the transition to Whole-Life Disciple-Making communities. It’s fascinating to see the range of churches who are either showing real interest or who have actually come on board with the Imagine Project here in the North West - a long-established Anglican church, a non-denominational new plant, a large Black-majority congregation, a lively Church of the Nazarene congregation, a URC church, a relatively new church in the Oasis network...

In addition, we’re in serious dialogue with a major denomination as to how we can help them across the entire region in giving a renewed emphasis to the vital importance of helping their members live as authentic and effective followers of Jesus in their everyday lives.

I haven’t the slightest misgiving that this is a task that’s worth every ounce of energy we can put into it. Nor do I think for a moment that the task will be easy or quick. One of the most effective church leaders I know said this to me as he reflected somewhat regretfully on 20 years of ministry which most observers would have considered effective and successful:

‘As I look back, I realise that I didn’t create a system that intentionally produced disciples. Instead, I created a centralised missional station to do mission. The intention was mission and discipleship was a by product...I was driving a mission truck with a follow-up discipleship van...I would now create a spiritual formation within the mission.’

The more I contemplate his words, the more I’m convinced that the Imagine Church Project has a vital part to play in changing the culture of the church, not only here in the North West, but throughout the nation - creating a culture in which disciple-making is at the heart of all we do. And I can’t think of anything I’d rather devote my time to. Though, if Scotland ever made it to the World Cup Finals and they were looking to hire a coach, it’d be a close call...

Work in Progress

2010-07-07T15:48:00.004+01:00

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.

The Evangelisation of the UK: LICC/Imagine Research (2 of 3)

2010-07-06T16:11:00.004+01:00

This is the second in a series summarising the findings of LICC Imagine research 2003-2010. In this post we look at research conducted amongst Christians identifying the key issues they are facing. Read the first of the series here...

Fit for Mission? Equipping the Church
Non-Christians are asking many fundamental questions about meaning, purpose and identity. The problem that occurs is that the Christian narrative is not seen as relevant to a response. Of further concern is that, as our research among Christians highlights, many believers, despite professing faith, are asking exactly the same questions. Despite discovering a ‘fundamental’ meaning to life, they struggle to connect this with a lived reality that fuels purpose and identity in the everyday. In other words, it seems many Christians ‘still haven’t found what they’re looking for.’

Two key studies have been conducted by LICC: What the People Said (2003) surveying 800 people reflecting on their experience of faith, and Apprentice ’09 (2009) surveying 3,000 Spring Harvest guests’ perceptions of discipleship and the challenges they face in today’s world. These studies have been complemented by the Imagine Pilot Project (2007-10) working with 16 churches from a number of denominations. It is important to note that this research has focussed on those who would be considered the ‘most committed’ in church terms (i.e. regularly attending, regularly giving and regularly involved. Iit is these people who are struggling to live out a faith that makes a difference.

Three central points emerge from the research:

Firstly, the key underlying issue is the sacred-secular divide, whereby the teaching and emphasis of the church is abstracted from the context of daily living. There is a clear disconnect between the church and the ordinary places of life (the home, workplace, etc.) where members of the church spend the majority of their time. The central problem for evangelism is that these places are the primary mission contexts for the church at large. The inability to bridge the gap between the church and the ‘frontline’ means that Christians are not being equipped and resourced with a coherent vision for and sense of purpose in those contexts where they might make the greatest difference.

Secondly, Christians are more often struggling to survive in the contexts they share with non-Christians rather than working to connect. To note just one aspect of this, research highlights that in the workplace, believers and non-believers are facing similar levels of stress and problems of work-life balance. This leads to two questions: 1) Has evangelism been lost as a priority? 2) Is a coherent witness and credible alternative visible to non-Christians? At heart this is an issue of discipleship, can the church equip people with the means to discover distinctive ways of living that signal lives infused with the goodness of God?

Thirdly, there is the issue of the acute discomfort with evangelism and its perception as a burdensome task. Evangelism is seen by many as simply doing strange things to strange people in strange places. It is not perceived as a whole-life activity. Indeed, many Christians are uncomfortable with the idea of their life as a witness or reject the idea outright. Research suggests that Christians are unhappy with traditional notions and practices of evangelism, but new, creative ways of connecting with people have not been forthcoming. On a practical level, the majority of Christians lack the skills to share their faith with non-believers.

a) The Question of Testimony
47% of survey respondents say they don’t have a story to tell about how God has worked in their lives.
b) Purpose & Vision
Only 36% of respondents affirmed that they see themselves as a full-time Christian. When asked what are their most pressing questions: 28% named issues of purpose/direction and guidance, 15% focussed on church and 11% pointed to identity as an issue.
c) Challenge of Context
59% identify the workplace as the most challenging place to be a Christian. Followed by the neighbourhood (34%) and the home (24%).
d) Consumed by Life
Fatigue (55%) and time pressures (55%) are the key issues affecting people’s
personal-spiritual life. 32% identify the question of being a witness for God as an issue.
e) Disconnection of Church
43% of respondents feel that their church is equipping them to 64% say the church has helped them at most only a little with issues they face in the workplace. (Only 11% say it has helped a lot with that context.) 54% say the church has helped them at most only a little with the issues they face at home.
f) Enskilling
Only 41% of people claim to know how to lead someone to Christ. 36% know how to help a new believer start to grow in their faith and in living it out in the world. One of the most frequently highlighted areas is in the area of equipping with ways of sharing
the gospel in a ‘non-cringe worthy’ manner.
g) Challenge of Imagination
The drought of real-life stories of people with a vision for living ordinary life for Christ is a recurring challenge in working with churches. The church community is not perceived as equipping with imaginative possibilities of sharing the gospel in ways that can be related with.
h) Hunger for growth
55% of people say they pray about how they might be used in the world.

Talk: Whole Loaf & Whole-Life Disciples (MP3)

2010-07-01T16:13:00.007+01:00

Neil Hudson, the Imagine Project Director, recently introduced the ideas behind the Imagine project to a group from Crofton Parish Church, Stubbington. The talk was recorded and has been made available on their website. For those interested in hearing more about whole-life discipleship this talk may provide a useful way in.

To hear or download Neil's talk click here...

Crafting Conversation

2010-06-30T10:23:00.004+01:00

The following article was written as part of LICC's weekly Connecting with Culture email series last November. I am reposting it here as we believe that the question it addresses is of fundamental significance for disciplemaking communities. We would love to hear your responses and ideas for how we might creatively address this issue...

Bernard Cribbins, familiar to generations of children as the voice of Jackanory and the Wombles, receives a special award at the Children's Baftas this weekend. Interviewed recently, he was asked the secret to good storytelling. He replied, 'to concentrate on one child, look them directly in the eye, and make them listen to every single thing I say.'

Yet in our world of hyper-communication, myriad means of contact (texts, blogs and tweets) provide an ever-greater choice of options for avoiding eye contact. The art of storytelling - even the art of conversation itself - are under threat as the quality of our interactions is reduced and ever more functionalised.

Over recent years we have become increasingly comfortable with the idea of Scripture as story, and how our lives are intertwined with the great story of Scripture. Yet, despite this helpful emphasis, one cannot help but wonder about our ability to converse about the goodness of God in our lives, to share the story of his work in us. We might reflect on this in regard to our interactions with those outside the Christian community - work colleagues, friends and acquaintances; but increasingly we must also ask about the quality of the storytelling within our Christian communities, our ability to converse with one another about God in church.

At the end of a service on a Sunday morning there is often a hubbub of conversation. Inquiring after one another, sharing experiences of the week gone by, joking around, arranging meetings; are these really conversations where we look each other in the eye? From personal experience, rarely are the stories of what God has been doing in our lives shared in such moments. Rarely, do we ask. Rarely, do we speak the name of Jesus.

We are, it seems, frequently lost for words when it comes to sharing our everyday, ordinary experience of faith: moments of grace experienced; the sense of illumination as something we haven't understood before suddenly comes into focus; questions returned to time and again. These 'grace awakenings' and revelations may be confided to partners and journals, but otherwise remain unspoken.

Perhaps this is the time to begin training, not only taming, our tongues. The church desperately needs to help its people develop a fluency in Scripture so that they might, in turn, become fluent in whole-life discipleship, and in doing so become fluent in sharing in everyday language and conversation what the Lord of life is doing in their lives - one-to-one, face-to-face, eye-to-eye.

Perhaps this Sunday we might begin...

The Evangelisation of the UK: LICC/Imagine Research (1 of 3)

2010-06-24T16:37:00.007+01:00

Over the past seven years LICC has conducted a number of pieces of research exploring the question of the evangelisation of the UK. We have looked at this question from a number of angles:

What are the barriers and bridges to belief today for non-Christians? What has proved to be key for people coming to faith?
What do Christians think about the question of mission? Are we fit for purpose?
What is the role of leaders in equipping people for mission?

Over this next series of posts we will attempt to synthesise some of the most important findings from our research. More depth can be found by clicking on the links and exploring the research findings in full.

What non-believers think & the power of the life lived
Beyond Belief (interviews with 40 agnostics exploring attitudes to religion, Christianity and belief conducted 2003) and Beyond the Fringe (research into the varied beliefs and understandings of people who have no formalised faith conducted 2005) demonstrate there is widespread and near automatic distrust of formalised religion.

Often there is a disconnection between the big questions people have and (the perception of) Christianity’s traditional responses. Although the respondent’s understanding of the real content of the Christian narrative was usually partial and often filled with assumption and hearsay, it is contact with the ‘strange’ witness of believers who are actively living the gospel that is the most challenging and disorientating to those who are critical of religion and Christianity. Indeed, in a context where institutional religion is dismissed out of hand, the tangible witness of the individual to a new way of living becomes all the more important.

These findings were significant for LICC as they convinced us that the missional issue of the evangeliastion of the UK is essentially a discipleship issue. The UK will not be won for Christ by discovering a silver bullet or by seeing people come into an institution that they distrust but by equipping God's people to live well wherever they are.

Here in more detail were our findings...

Barriers to Belief:

a) Cultural Barriers
i. A mechanically critical attitude towards religion. The church as an ‘institution’ is automatically untrustworthy. Professing hatred for religion verges on being a social necessity.
ii. Church perceived to be inflexible and insufficiently consumer friendly
iii. Underlying assumption that belief is synonymous with credulousness and that religious faith demands complete, unquestioning obedience
b) Personal Barriers
i. Perception that only religious people can be hypocrites
ii. Guerrilla morality – aggressive defence of moral credentials but these are always their own, remaining internalised and never formally proclaimed
iii. Tolerance was the unquestioned supreme deity in the respondent’s universe of values; intolerance the greatest sin (Tolerance however is in the eye of the beholder)
c) Ecclesiastical Barriers
i. Perception of church as cold and antiquated
ii. Believers initially perceived as patronising, narrow-minded, colourless, judgemental misfits, although this did not square with personal experience
iii. Knowledge of Bible and Christian teaching low – the most ignorant respondents tended to be the most vociferous critics
d) Intellectual Barriers
i. The perceived unreliability of the Bible
ii. The problem of pain
iii. The warfare between science and religion

Bridges to Belief:

a) Social Bridges
i. Recognition of social malaise and a near unanimous sense of disaffection (lack of respect for authority, family breakdown, omni-consumerism, instant gratification and value-less TV)
b) Personal Bridges
i. Most respondents indicated a spiritual interest
ii. Whilst religion was vigorously criticised, spirituality was widely praised
iii. However, spirituality is popular as it is about my self-fulfilment and demands little of me that I don’t wish to give. It is as much a barrier as a bridge to Christian faith.
c) Ecclesiastical Bridges
i. Clear differentiation between ‘normal’ (i.e. nominal) Christians and genuine
(sometimes called born-again) believers
ii. The latter are perceived to be strange but sincere and usually decent
d) Intellectual Bridges
i. Whilst it would be nice to believe in God, it is not perceived as intellectually defensible
ii. Most people have lost the traditional Christian spiritual language and as a result have no natural vocabulary for the sense and experience of the numinous they still have.

The Power of Story

2010-06-22T15:23:00.003+01:00

One of the central emphases of the Imagine Project has been in helping churches rediscover the power of stories and testimonies. Testimonies are of course an old, old idea…but at the same time they remain powerful. Although many churches still use testimonies we have tried to help them reflect on their function and content. In addition, we try to underline the significance of a number of elements to testimony that have often been missed or ignored and emphasise the power of stories from the Frontline. Here we identify a number of key elements...

Stories reveal significance
Take a moment to think about the life stories that you hear at a church service on a typical Sunday. What are they about? Who are they about? Who shares those stories? In which settings do the stories take place? What do they concern - are they primarily about church activities or the activities of people’s lives? Finally, what was the conclusion and explanation of the story?

We tell stories about the people, things, experiences and places we see as significant. In a church context what we tell stories about communicates what we value. Who speaks from the platform and shares stories tells about who we see as authoritative. Where stories are located shows where we consider are the places that we recognise God is significantly at work.

Stories give significance
It is important to highlight that stories of significance are often invited stories. That is, they are deliberately sought after and asked for. Being asked to share their stories and experiences is a very real encouragement to people. For leaders this means part of their task when out and about or meeting with their congregations is to listen to people with an ear for their daily stories. Individuals may not recognise the worth and implications for others of their own stories, it is others who recognise significance.

Inviting stories also means providing space and opportunity for stories to be shared. People often refrain from sharing their stories because they are afraid of judgement; consequently, it is important that story sharing is done in a safe environment and an atmosphere of encouragement.

Stories stimulate imaginative possibility
Stories are powerful because in the mind of the listener they paint a picture that goes beyond a communication of a simple fact or message. Annette Simmons notes, "Story is a reimagined experience narrated with enough detail and feeling to cause your listeners' imaginations to experience it as real." The colour and vibrancy of a good story stimulates an emotional and empathetic response. Hearing a good story the listener is forced to ask ‘what would I have done?’ This is a powerful question that stimulates reflection.

Further, stories show the dynamics, complexities and ambiguities of situations. Stories resist the urge we might have to boil situations down to a simple morality which is so rarely discovered in everyday life. Stories show the dynamics and trajectory of change, the real decision making processes that people enter into on a daily basis. Stories embed truth in everyday life, experience and its attendant uncertainties.

Stories emerge in the context of everyday life
The setting of a story is significant. If we only tell stories about church events and activities, we may risk suggesting that only in church activities do we see God at work. Who knows the best stories and examples from everyday life? Often it is the church member, who is out every day in the workplace. The best person to tell these stories is the person involved; leaders do not need to become the mouthpieces for others.

Leaders, in allowing their congregations to hear stories from everyday life (and we acknowledge that at first these stories may seem hard to discover), give people a model for how to view their own everyday lives: as significant places in which God is active both in using the disciple but also in shaping and forming the disciple.

Of course this doesn’t mean that all stories from everyday life are helpful. A good question to ask about a story you hear is, ‘does this story provoke me to wonder, encouragement or question my presuppositions about life?’

Stories create understanding
Translating our experiences into shared stories gives us the opportunity to understand and reflect on real life. We learn spiritual lessons through everyday life and the stories that emerge in that context. Church can and should play a crucial role in helping individuals process and make sense of those lessons. The importance could be theological, what this reveals about God and how He works, or personal, what we understand about ourselves. Sharing these stories gives an opportunity for creating understanding – an understanding that isn’t abstract but wisdom situated in experience.

Stories need interpreters
Whereas stories are often best told by the person to whom they happened, they may be best understood by others. We are often unable to see the wider significance of our own stories. Of course, others may interpret it differently or see other significances in a story and engaging in this kind of reflection is a valuable exercise. The role of the church leader is particularly important in this respect, they ‘frame’ the story, revealing its larger context and significance. Further, it is the role of the leader to call attention to how the small story is wrapped up in and echoes the big story of the gospel, the activity of God’s kingdom and the mission of the Church. The leader performs the work of contextualizing the story, creating a framework in which the story can be heard and understood.

Not all stories conclude neatly
We have to be careful of stories that we can reduce to neat little morals. Sometimes it is powerful to share stories of situations that are already emerging and still developing or haven’t yet concluded. In this way we communicate to people that it is not only the conclusion, but that the journey is equally valuable. Again, in hearing stories that are current, we recognise that we own these stories as a community. ‘Success’ stories are not the only ones that need to be told in a church context. We need stories that are real, can be learnt from and encourage; such stories come in many forms and have many different endings.

Recently one of the pilot project churches invited one of their members to share about his experience as a Post Office worker deciding whether to take part in union strike action. This was a new step for the church. The man asked for prayer for wisdom about what he should do. Significantly, he was asked whilst still in the midst of the strike. Some in the church were uneasy about this – feeling that a Christian shouldn’t strike, but crucially it provided an opportunity to reflect together on the reality of where this Christian was working.

Stories create community
Although stories are individual, they are not individualistic. Hearing the testimonies that emerge from church member’s lives gives the community the opportunity to celebrate, rejoice and on occasion mourn and weep together (Rom 12:15). Communities need such occasions. Consequently, it is important to emphasise, although testimonies may well be individual stories, communities own these stories together. In this way, stories create connections that in turn strengthen the community.

Stories spark stories
Stories breed other stories. When a person has begun to see the significance of someone else’s story, it brings to mind their own experiences which they in turn are able to share. We hear our own stories in the light of other people’s stories and ultimately in the light of the biblical story. In this way you can see a snowballing of story sharing which becomes an exciting and dynamic celebration of God at work.

Giving Church Another Chance, Todd Hunter

2010-06-15T12:44:00.005+01:00

Why read this book
At a time when many people are re-thinking the value of the gathered church as a place of spiritual formation, Todd Hunter writes to encourage us to connect all we do in gathered worship with our everyday life.

About the author
Previously he was the national director of both the Vineyard Churches USA and Alpha USA. He’s now a bishop for the Anglican Mission in the Americas. He has a website where you can read more about his work and other books.

About the book: overview
When most people talk about church, they normally focus on what is happening on Sunday mornings and so concentrate on the quality of preaching, sung worship, seats and coffee and so on. The book wants us to view the activities of church worship as a springboard for the whole of life, rather than as ends in themselves.

About the book: main themes
The book reflects on the main liturgical ‘moves’ that happen in most churches: singing, scripture reading, the sermon, the offering, communion, receiving the benediction. These ‘moves’ are linked to the overall mission purpose of God for the world.
Hunter wants to see the life of the gathered church as being a spiritual discipline that will enable people to live well for Christ in the whole of their lives.

About the book: implications
Todd Hunter wanted to write the book to encourage people who either are new to church worship, or who have become so disillusioned with it, to re-engage with the church. For LICC readers, along with this encouragement, there is a chance to see how someone is re-imagining, he calls it re-practising, the disciplines of church worship for the sake of discipleship in everyday life. For those of us leading churches, this is crucial. We don’t need to be scrambling to become more ‘relevant’ to everyday life; we need to think about how we can become more ‘connected’ to everyday life. ‘Relevance’ can stunt our worship together, making it utilitarian. ‘Connectedness’ encourages us to think how our life together flows out into our experience of being scattered across towns and cities for most of the week.

Questions to ask of the book
1. To what extent does Hunter’s decision to join the Anglican Communion give him the ‘zeal of a new convert’, that may see liturgical life through rose-coloured spectacles?
2. There are few stories from people on the frontline showing how the practices of church have shaped their engagement in everyday life. Is this because there wasn’t room in a short book, or is it because they still need to be sought out?

Questions for the reader to answer
1. Would this book help everyone get a bigger perspective on why we gather to worship? As a participant is it obvious how your church services relate to ongoing life?
2. Recognizing that most Christian arguments are about doctrinal understanding rather than Christian virtues, he writes, ‘When was the last time you heard a debate between Christian leaders over the proper way to love those who are hurting us?’ (p29). Why is that? Do we assume that it will just come naturally? Is this why we never see these virtues as ‘skills’ that need to be nurtured?

Graham Cray - Discerning Leadership

2010-06-14T14:51:00.009+01:00

In a warmly received event, Bishop Graham Cray launched the new leadership series of Grove booklets at LICC last week, speaking on Discerning Leadership: Co-operating with the Spirit of God.

You can listen to and download Bishop Graham's talk and the following panel discussion here. Download the accompanying PowerPoint slide set here.

Order a copy of the booklet from the Grove Books website.

This event was hosted in partnership with CPAS.

Biblical Theology for Life Series

2010-06-10T15:38:00.000+01:00

I’ve been interested to see that Zondervan have plans to publish a ‘Biblical Theology for Life’ series. Two volumes have been announced as forthcoming later this year, and both of them look excellent:

Christopher J.H. Wright, The Mission of God’s People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, forthcoming 2010).

In The Mission of God’s People, part of the Biblical Theology for Life series, author Chris Wright offers a sweeping biblical survey of the holistic mission of the church, providing practical insight for today’s church leaders. Wright gives special emphasis to theological trajectories of the Old Testament that not only illuminate God’s mission but also suggest priorities for Christians engaged in God’s world-changing work.

Description:
In The Mission of God’s People, Chris Wright shows how God’s big-picture plan directs the purpose of God’s people, the church. Wright’s pioneering 2006 book, The Mission of God, revealed that the typical Christian understanding of ‘missions’ encompasses only a small part of God’s overarching mission for the world. God is relentlessly reclaiming the entire world for himself. Wright emphasizes what the Old Testament teaches Christians about being the people of God. He addresses questions of both ecclesiology and missiology with topics like ‘called to care for creation,’ ‘called to bless the nations,’ ‘sending and being sent,’ and ‘rejecting false gods.’ As part of the Biblical Theology for Life Series, this book provides you – whether you’re a pastor, teacher, or lay learner – with first-rate biblical study while at the same time addressing the practical concerns of contemporary ministry. The Mission of God’s People promises to enliven and refocus the study, teaching, and ministry of those truly committed to joining God’s work in the world.

Jonathan Lunde, Following Jesus, the Servant King: A Biblical Theology of Covenantal Discipleship (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, forthcoming 2010).

In Following Jesus, the Servant King, Jonathan Lunde presents a biblical theology of discipleship that gives the ‘big picture’ of God’s relationship with humanity. In biblical terms, Jesus is the King who demands righteous obedience from his followers, and Jesus is the Servant who provides the grace that enables this obedience. Lunde presents a view of Christian discipleship that is grounded in an informed Christology of Jesus, the Servant King.

Description:
Throughout the Old Testament and into the New, God not only demands righteousness from his people but also showers on grace that enables them to act. Jesus, of course, provides the ultimate fulfillment of these twin aspects of God’s relationship to humanity. In biblical terms, Jesus is the King who demands righteous obedience from his followers, and Jesus is the Servant who provides the grace that enables this obedience. So what does it mean to follow Jesus? What does God expect from his followers, and how can they be and do what is required? Jonathan Lunde answers these and other questions in his sweeping biblical study on discipleship. He surveys God’s interaction with his people from Eden to Jesus, paying special attention to the biblical covenants that illuminate the character and plans of God. He offers Bible students and teachers – such as pastors, missionaries, and lay leaders – the gift of practical biblical teaching rooted in the Bible’s witness on the vital topic of discipleship.

Michael J. Wilkins on Discipleship 1

2010-06-09T11:50:00.003+01:00

Michael J. Wilkins has published a few books on the topic of discipleship, from the focused and academic…

Michael J. Wilkins, The Concept of Disciple in Matthew’s Gospel As Reflected in the Use of the Term Μαθητής, Supplements to Novum Testamentum LIX (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1988), republished with an additional chapter as Discipleship in the Ancient World and Matthew’s Gospel (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1995).

… to the bigger and broader overview…

Michael J. Wilkins, Following the Master: Discipleship in the Steps of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992).

… to the more popular and practical…

Michael J. Wilkins, In His Image: Reflecting Christ in Everyday Life (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1997).

More concise and accessible are a pair of articles he has published, which are available online:

Michael J. Wilkins, ‘Disciple, Discipleship’, in Walter A. Elwell (ed.), Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1996), 175-77.

Michael J. Wilkins, ‘Disciple-Making for Changing Times and Changing Churches’, Enrichment (Winter 2008), 41-46.

I’ll summarise the thrust of each of these in a further two posts.

Imagine: The Story So Far...

2010-06-04T14:56:00.004+01:00

As the Imagine project is now seven years old, for those new to what the project is doing we thought it might help to recap how the project has developed, the progression of our thinking and how we hope to see the project developing over the next period of time.

2003: Publication of Imagine
Imagine began with Mark Greene’s essay Imagine: How we can reach the UK. The central thesis argued for a recovery of whole-life disciplemaking as key to mission in the 21st century. With a copy distributed to every person receiving the Evangelical Alliance’s Idea magazine, Imagine struck a chord with many who read it. As Joel Edwards, the EA General Director commented, ‘The response by our readers was extraordinary. Never before have we received such a wave of positive affirmation from a publication.’

2004: Imagine Project
With the unexpected scale of the response to the Imagine essay, the question began to be asked, ‘so, how do we respond to the issues raised?’ Consequently in May 2004 the Imagine Project was launched, led by Tracy Cotterell, as a grassroots pilot learning and experimentation project with local churches. The project began by focussing on research and consultation. The first step of which was to engage in a listening exercise, leading to two reports What the People Said and What the Leaders Said that identified the issues and barriers to whole-life discipleship capturing the perspectives of both church leaders and members.

2005: Understanding the task – Focus on culture shift
In 2005, LICC hosted the Let My People Grow conference in partnership with RUN, launched the first website and published the second magazine Let My People Grow. By this stage the project was gaining focus recognising that the core issue was that of culture shift, creating the right environment for whole-life disciples to flourish and focusing in particular on the values that underpin it.

2006: Transferable Resources
2006 focussed on creating resources that would begin to engage churches and church leaders with the whole-life conversation. This led to the production of the Imagine DVD and the book Let My People Grow (if you’ve got a good title stick with it!) which was a collection of essays for church leaders.

2007-8: Research & Development
2007 heralded the launch of the Imagine Pilot Project, led by Church-life Consultant Neil Hudson, as a three year experimental pilot research programme. Working with 16 churches from a number of denominations across the country the project had a number of aims:

1) to help leaders grasp a vision for making 'whole life disciples' in their communities
2) to help leaders and churches introduce simple actions that start a change of culture
3) to develop the starter materials to pass it on and start to help people grow
4) to understand the possibilities of networking people together to create a forum that catalyses and reproduces this way of life
5) to identify and start to tackle the major hurdles that impede growth
6) to identify the key elements that allow this way of life to become a reality in many churches in the UK
7) to demonstrate that focusing on whole life discipleship in an apprenticing culture leads to a healthy church and ongoing fruitfulness

This period also saw the Imagine project connect with Bishop Graham Cray who developed the series 21st Century Disciples looking at what it means to be a disciple in the modern day and exploring the biblical dimensions of whole-life discipleship.

2009-10: Preparation for Scalability
With the first pilot project coming to a close, having learnt a number of important lessons and developed a process that churches can adopt to become whole-life disciplemaking communities, the project has begun to focus on the question of transferability. How can the lessons we have learnt in the pilot project be best disseminated and shared with other churches?

To this end the Imagine project has been developing four core areas of work:

1) Transferable consultancy: developing consultancy and leadership training capacity and skills that allow us to work effectively with churches keen to become whole-life disciplemaking communities.
2) The North-West Pilot Project: Chick Yuill heads up the North-West Pilot Project, the aim of which is to focus on a working with a group of churches in a specific geographical region to broaden the research parameters of the project so that we learn not only what works, but also much more about the barriers to whole-life discipleship. Additionally, and vitally, a North-West pilot creates the opportunity to develop wisdom in how to pass on the learning that our current church consultant has acquired to others so that they will be able to take a church through the process of culture shift.
3) Denominational engagement: The work of the Imagine has been very warmly received by a number of denominations and we recognise that as a small team we need to be working in creative partnerships to maximise our effectiveness. In particular this has led to extensive engagement with the Baptist Union of Great Britain, Elim and the Methodists.
4) Product development: Imagine has always rejected the idea of discipleship as a programme. However, we do want to give churches the tools that they can use in the culture shift process to stimulate imagination. Currently, under development are a book containing conclusions, learnings and ideas from the first pilot project and a second small group resource on equipping for life on the Frontline.

Alongside these elements, the original message of the Imagine essay still burns brightly in our minds. As the 2009 LICC/Spring Harvest Apprentice Survey demonstrated, the sacred-secular divide remains a potent reality, huge numbers of people in churches across the UK are daily struggling, failing to identify God’s purposes in their lives and unaware of the significance of their presence in homes, workplaces and the many other places they have been called. Our desire remains to see God’s people flourishing as whole-life followers of Christ wherever they are, whatever they are called to do, released, resourced and supported to make a difference.

5 Values: 5 - We Commit To Growth As Whole-life Disciples

2010-06-03T09:23:00.003+01:00

This is the last in a series of posts on 5 Values for a Whole-life Disciplemaking Church. Read the inroduction to the series.

As our lives develop, we are faced with the challenges of new transitional moments, situations that are new to us, challenges and opportunities that we couldn’t have imagined. And in each situation we are given the chance to grow or to retreat to familiar practices.

This commitment to ongoing learning on everyone’s part, can make some feel vulnerable. We have been happier when we have felt that we have known everything and can teach everyone else. This has been a false confidence. We need to recognise the transparency that is needed when we commit ourselves to life-long learning; when we can joyfully affirm that we have not grown enough in our understanding of the Bible, that we are seeing new things there. There is a godly humility in listening to others in the body of Christ who are different from ourselves. When we do this, we don’t simply affirm their worth as people, we grow as well. There is a release when we can own up to the feelings of powerlessness that can threaten to capsize us when we are in new situations or positions. But if these are seen to be places where we can be further shaped to be like Jesus, or where we can make a real difference for the sake of others, then we can embrace the risks that would scare us otherwise.

The cost of committing to growth is to be willing to accept ‘growing pains’. You might be able to remember these pains when you were a teenager. There was nothing wrong with you, you were perfectly healthy, but the pains in your legs were real. Nobody could do anything for you, it was a phase you did go through, however irritated you were when people gave you that prognosis.

So it will be in these churches. There will be the pains of growth as well as the joys of having grown. You can’t have one without the other.

Expanding the Value
This means:

1) We recognise that we grow as disciples in the whole of life and that
discipleship is a lifelong journey
2) We recognise that our experiences have the capacity to shape us either more into the image of Christ or less.
3) We seek to grow in knowledge and in grace (2 Pet 3) and in the fruits of the Spirit (Gal 5:22)
4) It is normal for us to share the things of Christ, what he has been doing in our lives with each other when we meet and speak
5) We seek to help one another transition well from each phase of life to the next recognising that these can be the moments of greatest challenge

Holy Spirit in the World Today Conference

2010-05-28T11:27:00.006+01:00

Last week I was privileged to attend the Holy Spirit in the World Today Conference at Holy Trinity Brompton. Amongst others speaking were Jürgen Moltmann, Miroslav Volf, David Ford, Tom Smail and Rowan Williams – quite a line up!

The conference was significant for a number of reasons: firstly, it was determinedly church centric. Few academic conferences would be hosted in a church context, yet on a number of occasions participants explicitly noted that academia has lagged behind the church in exploring pneumatology. Jürgen Moltmann in particular reflected on his experiences in his church in Tübingen, echoing the cry of the ecological movement that we ‘think global, but act local.’ Secondly and strikingly, explicit connection was made with the Frontline. The second speaker on the Thursday was Ken Costa, Chairman of Lazard International Bank and creator of the God at Work course, speaking about the need for a pneumatology that embraces the workplace and the home.

The conference explored a number of questions:

How does the Spirit work in the church?
In what ways is the Spirit at work in the wider culture and the workplace?
How does the Spirit relate to the Trinitarian life of God?
How does the Spirit relate to the mission of the church?
Is the Spirit at work in other faiths?
How does the Spirit affect Christian life and ethical choices?
What does 'openness to the Spirit' mean?

There is little space here to go into each talk in detail, and I understand there are plans to release the talks from the conference on CD and DVD at some point in the near future. Already available is Archbishop Rowan Williams excellent opening homily on Romans 8. This short talk is well worth listening to as Rowan explores the question of what it means to be a human being fully alive. Listen to it here...

Update: All the talks for the conference are now available to download for free from the St Melitus website.

Connecting Sunday With Monday

2010-05-28T10:02:00.007+01:00

Dave Gooderidge, minister at Lymington Baptist for the past 10 years, has been seeking to create a whole-life disciplemaking culture in his church. Here he shares something of their experiences...

The conviction that God is interested in the whole of life was rooted into me primarily as a student under Mark Greene at London School of Theology. So as a minister, the Sunday has always connected with Monday. I didn’t know anything different!

I think this is crucial to our understanding of the church. There is a big thing in the Baptist understanding of church about ‘walking together in ways known and ways to be made known; watching over and being watched over,’ what that means is, if we are going to grow as whole-life disciples we need to band together. We need to watch over and look out for one another and ask questions, about how you are getting on with your boss, for example, creating mutual care and accountability.

As a minister, I try and listen hard to people when it comes to what they do and what is going on in their lives. I might not understand the finer details of how to build a power station or trade on a foreign exchange. But I want to try and understand, to get a sense of what it is like. It is a genuine thing and I don’t think you can fake it.

This thinking has shaped my pastoral ministry. One of Mark’s ideas that stuck was the 11 o’clock preaching test: what difference will what I’m saying at 11 o’clock on Sunday make at 11 o’clock Monday morning? It is a very simple idea. But as a preacher, it makes you ask, how will this help, in the boardroom, the factory or putting the third load of washing in?

As a church whatever we do, we seek to connect to work, home and leisure. We do a slot on Sunday, ‘From the Frontline’, where we interview someone for 5 minutes asking four questions. First, where is your frontline? In other words, where do you engage with today’s world? Second, what do you most enjoy there? Third, what do you find hardest? And, fourth, how can we pray for you? It’s a short thing but people appreciate hearing about what others do and what is important to them.

We’ve done a number of simple things, one degree shifts really. For example, on our mission notice board, we post details of the missionaries we are supporting, but we’ve also put up a mirror, which reminds everyone that we’re on mission too.

I’ve also taken a shift at Costa Coffee and that has helped earth my ministry. It reminds me that the average person in the street is so far away from the big story of our faith, they often haven’t got a clue about what we are talking about. I’ve begun to recognise where people are coming from and the kind of questions they are asking.

It is hard to quantify how people have responded but I see a growing awareness that we can’t compartmentalise our lives and it is fun when we don’t. I think we have a long way to go, but I do think we have a culture developing where we are trying to connect Monday with Sunday. I think it is in the DNA. People don’t notice it terribly, but it is just there. People are becoming more confident and they are recognizing that discipleship is supposed to be 24/7.

5 Values: 4 - We Are Active Listeners

2010-05-27T11:51:00.004+01:00

This is part of a series of posts on 5 Values for a Whole-life Disciplemaking Church. Read the introduction to the series.

‘Our task is the opposite of distraction. It's to help people concentrate on the real, but often hidden, event of God's active presence in our lives.’ Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart

Clearly, Christians need to learn to listen to one another, to understand the pressures that they face and the opportunities that are available. But listening goes further than this. We need to be able to discern the forces that are work in our culture which may be a challenge to our discipleship, or may encourage us to think more deeply about our relationship with God. We need to hear the cries of the world to know how best to begin the dialogue that might enable us to offer the good news to people. We need to develop attentive hearing to the promptings of God, who we believe is at work in his world, bringing new creation out of the spaces where previously there were only signs of despair. And we need to encourage people to be able to understand what is happening in their own lives so that they can grow in self-awareness, moving away from the temptation of self-deception towards the liberation of authentic honesty.

However, we live in a world of multiple distractions, overwhelmings and competing demands on attention; the ability to listen is in short supply and discernment needed. So, we need to enable communities and individuals to develop active listening skills. In doing so, we are signalling the profound truth that we are taking people seriously and wanting to understand. And in encouraging people to grow in their spiritual discernment, we are helping them to move from an interior personalised faith, to one that is confident to believe that God might be involved in their situations, wanting them to be his co-labourers.

Expanding the Value
This means that:

1) We recognise that in every situation God speaks the first word and we respond to him
2) We seek to grow in the skills of active listening and discernment
3) We recognise that we live in a world where there are multiple distractions and so we seek to cultivate attentiveness
4) We practice listening to God, others, ourselves and our culture
5) We provide contexts for people to share the issues they are facing in life and spaces for discernment
6) The community practices attentiveness in suffering, surprises and small things
7) Distractions are recognised and named

One Degree Shift Ideas

2010-05-25T12:46:00.005+01:00

Small changes are helpful in a culture shift programme, because they are visible, create little sense of anxiety, operate as powerful symbols for the overall change that is hoped for, can easily be reversed or adapted if they are not working well, do not have to be defended to the death.

We have already put together a list of one degree shift ideas on the Imagine website.

However, we recently came across a list of 23 ideas from Nelvin Vos and Melvin George for Equipping and Encouraging the Laity on the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America website that you may be interested to explore as well.

We'd love to hear any ideas you've tried. What has worked? What didn't?

5 Values: 3 - We Connect The 10 To The 110

2010-05-19T12:58:00.006+01:00

This is part of a series of posts on 5 Values for a Whole-life Disciplemaking Church. Read the introduction to the series here...

‘We are gathered into communion so as to be sent our again. We are sent so as to come back. This…is the breathing of the Church ... this rhythm of gathering the community around the altar and then sending it away belongs to the oxygenation of the Church's life blood. Without it, the Church would stop breathing and die.’ Timothy Radcliffe, Why Go to Church?

There are 168 hours in the week.
Take away 48 hours for sleep and 120 remain.
Of those 120 even the most committed member of the church will probably only spend 10 hours in church activities.
That leaves 110 hours.

So here’s the crucial question: do we actively connect the 10 to the 110? How do we make the most of what we do in the 10 to support life in the 110? Are we able to bring the issues, challenges, questions which we encounter in the 110, on the Frontline, into the 10 hours we share together? Even further than this, is it possible that we might have a vision for the 10 which allows us to use the time and space we share together as a test-bed for life in the 110, a vision which allows us to recognise that whether together or apart, gathered or scattered, we are the body of Christ?

We believe the 110 needs the 10. The 10 needs the 110. The two have to be held together in dynamic relationship. We believe in the biblical need for the gathered experience of the church, time when God’s people are together to be encouraged, re-orientated to God’s Word and truth, engage in worship and prayer, sustained in the communion act of remembrance and baptism. And we believe that for each of these moments and practices shared together to be their most valuable they must be done mindful of the majority of time when God’s people are scattered. We need to be together to be something different when we are not together.

Expanding the Value
This means that:

1) We recognise that church members spend most of their time outside church contexts
2) What happens in here has to make a difference out there and we consciously help people make the links
3) We will not seek to use people, but to serve them in order that they might flourish in the whole of life
4) We come to church recognising that it has importance for resourcing, equipping, supporting and releasing us for the rest of life as followers of Christ
5) We discover what helps our members most in living well for Christ wherever they are
6) We help our members see how their service in church connects with God’s wider mission
7) Whatever activities we perform at church we seek to give people the skills and perspectives that help them in the rest of life
8) We have contexts at church in which people can explore the issues, questions, thoughts they have in the whole of life

Centered Life Website

2010-05-17T12:13:00.006+01:00

Sometimes it feels a little chaotic how connections are made between people exploring similar ideas, but thank God that he helps us connect the dots!

We recently stumbled across the brilliant Centered Life website and it turns out their concerns are very similar to those of the Imagine project in equipping churches to equip their members to follow Christ in the whole of life. They put it this way:

Your calling is your life, it's in the work you do every day - as a parent,
child, neighbour, caregiver, volunteer, worker, or however you spend your time.
To know your calling is to know:
meaning and purpose
identity and belonging
freedom and hope

Connected with the Luther Seminary they have produced a number of interesting resources and a process for churches to begin to explore and nurture calling amongst their members. It is well worth taking a look around their website.

In particular, watch the You! video (I tried to get this to play here but couldn't get it across) a brilliant 3 1/2 minute video exploring whole-life discipleship that could be used in sermons. (You can request a free copy on DVD.)

Changing the Culture

2010-05-14T13:00:00.008+01:00

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?

5 Values: 2 - We Value Everyone's Frontlines

2010-05-13T15:16:00.006+01:00

This is part of a series of posts on 5 Values for a Whole-life Disciplemaking Church. Read the introduction to the series here...

‘For Christian faith not to be idle in the world, the work of doctors and garbage collectors, business executives and artists, stay-at-home moms or dads and scientists needs to be inserted into God's story with the world. That story needs to provide the most basic rules by which the game in all these spheres is played. And that story needs to shape the character of the players.’ Miroslav Volf

Over the past twenty years, the church has become better at recognising the significance of many people’s vocations. Years ago, many evangelicals assumed that the top job for a Christian to have in God’s eyes was to be an overseas missionary living by faith. This was clearly sacrificial, often challenging and occasionally there would be no awareness of the fruitfulness of the work for many years, if ever. Below this in the assumed godly career ladder were ministers and church workers. If you weren’t able to be employed directly in these tasks, there was always your voluntary time that could be used for the important work.

Now we are at a stage when other careers are easily recognised as having kingdom value: the health care professions, teaching and social work all are closely connected to the traditional pastoral functions of a church. So these career tracks get quite a lot of support in Christian circles. But we are still uncertain as to the service industries, the retail sector and the ever developing leisure industry. And if prayer is offered for bankers, there may be more than a hint of the imprecatory psalms.

And these are only the work Frontlines...we believe that everyone has a Frontline and that everyone’s Frontline matters. Each member of the church, young or old, from playground to nursing home, has a frontline, each with various challenges and opportunities for disciples.

The whole life disciple making church will highlight and celebrate these places as the arenas in which God will not only use people for His glory, but also shape His people into His image.

Imagine what that might look like in your church community...a place where everyone is able to identify their Frontline and knows why it is significant in God's purposes, a place where people are comissioned to the Frontline, a place where people are excited about life on their Frontline and growing in the skill of identifying where and how God is at work there, a place where people are able to share their struggles on the Frontline with others in similar contexts and imagine new ways forward there as followers of Christ, a place where people share stories about how God is using them on their Frontline, a place where the Frontline is listened to and celebrated...

Expanding the value
So, to embrace this value means...

1)We recognise that everyone (young or old, working or not, sick or well) has a frontline
2)We expect that God is at work on the Frontline both shaping and using us
3)We affirm the significance of the Frontline as a place of growth
4)We recognise that the Frontline and the need to equip each other for it will impact our life together as a community
5)We are committed to exploring the Kingdom purposes of each Frontline
6)We help each other see the significance and value of their Frontline in God’s purposes
7)We encourage our members to know one another’s Frontlines

North-West Pilot Project Video

2010-05-13T10:33:00.004+01:00

We posted this video on our website before, but thought we would put it up here again as in it Chick outlines some of the thinking behind the North-West pilot project...

EVENT: Graham Cray on Discerning Leadership

2010-05-07T11:55:00.006+01:00

Grove Books are launching a new Leadership series at LICC on 8th June, 6:15-8:30pm. Bishop Graham Cray, who has written the first booklet of the series, will be speaking on Discerning Leadership: Co-operating with the Spirit of God.

Tickets are £7 (£5 for concessions) including refreshments and a copy of the first booklet. Bookings of 4 from one church get an additional place free.

To book your place call LICC on 020 7399 9555. More information is available here.

5 Values: 1 - We Submit To The Lordship Of Christ In All Things

2010-05-05T16:33:00.007+01:00

This is part of a series of posts on 5 values for a Whole-life Disciplemaking Church. Read the introduction to the series here.

Here is a conversation Neil had not so long ago with a group of students at a university Christian Union:

Neil: ‘Who is the Lord of all things?’
Students (Without missing a beat): ‘Jesus’
Neil: ‘Who is the Lord of the University?’
Students (Again in unison): ‘The Chancellor.’
Neil (Becoming somewhat more emphatic): ‘Ok, one more time. Who is the Lord of all things?’
Students: ‘Jesus’
Neil: ‘Right, so who is the Lord of the University?’
Students: ‘The Chancellor’

At which point we leave Neil to reflect on the current state of university education and his own teaching techniques…

The point is this: declaring Jesus to be Lord of all is a statement easily made. Recognising Jesus is actually Lord of all is a somewhat more complex reality. For whole-life disciplemaking churches the challenge is to make the Lordship of Christ not an abstract, ethereal matter but a truth real and meaningful in people’s day to day experience. A reality that changes the way I approach my work, my responsibilities as a father and a husband, the way I think about time and money, and can challenge the way I use my power. For this to be the case we need communities that will encourage their members that:

‘…whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.’ (Colossians 4:17)

Whole-life disciplemaking communities must be committed first and foremost to helping their members live in the name of the Lord Jesus, wherever they are, whatever they are doing.

Secondly, declaring the Lordship of Christ is not a cost-free statement. Declaring the Lordship of Christ either explicitly or implicitly challenges the other powers that seek to gain Lordship over us. This is not a super-spiritual statement but a daily reality. In other words, to submit to the Lordship of Jesus is not merely to sing some songs to remind ourselves (He hasn’t forgotten!), it is to live in the opposite spirit of all that appears to fly in the face of the values of the Kingdom of God. As the author David Foster Wallace put it:

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

Whether it is possessions, relationships, money, time, power etc., we recognise that there are other forces that are trying to disciple us. We therefore need the input of a Church community that will attune us to and help us discover the capacity to deal with the other forces that are seeking to claim our attention and worship.

So life in church will not be about merely providing information about God, Jesus, and Christianity. Our aim together will be to form and sustain Christian persons and congregations as disciples, as followers, of Jesus. This is crucial work, for if we don’t take on this task of conversion, the surrounding culture will. And it will convert someone effectively.

So, to embrace this value in our communities means:

1) We celebrate the fact there is no aspect of existence which lies outside the Lordship of Christ and his redemptive work
2) We live lives that acknowledge the Lordship of Christ in the places we are (at home, at work or at play)
3) We seek to identify the other things that would seek to become ‘other lords’
over us in our contemporary culture
4) We affirm the goodness of God at all times in all places
5) We recognise that we accompany God in his mission in the whole of life

A Theology of the Laity (1)

2010-04-30T14:45:00.015+01:00

…the laity, generally speaking, feels itself spiritually powerless and illiterate as to its witness in that sector, which is the very place where most of its life is spent. This is the appalling problem, hidden by the fact that this laity, impotent and paralysed in the most strategic region of their life, are often faithful worshippers and do all kinds of service in the ordinary run of church life. The problem is still more appalling because the relevancy of the Church, and what she represents in the modern world, is dependent on the conversion of this impotence and paralysis into a manifestation of power and spirit. (37-8)

Sounds like an extract from an LICC publication? These words were written in 1958 by Hendrik Kraemer in his Theology of the Laity. I stumbled across this book while we were in the process of clearing the LICC library and began to flick through it. It only took a few glances to realise that Kraemer's words (sadly) remain as potent and relevant today as when they were first published. (For those interested, the book is still in print and available from Amazon)

Kraemer was a lay theologian, linguist and missiologist, first director of Chateau de Bossy in Switzerland and a significant contributor to the revitalization of the Netherlands Reformed Church in the postwar situation. In this, one of his last books, Kraemer seeks to describe a theology of and not only for the laity, to adequately describe the place of the laity in the church. He saw this as a central task, arguing that it is not simply an "interesting intermezzo" but essentially reworks our idea of what it means to be church together with major implications for both leaders and laity. As we would term it, he is calling for a fundamental culture shift in the church toward the equipping of the laity:

Everything in the Church and in the world revolves around the so-called “ordinary member of the Church”. For in him must become somehow visible that the Lordship of Christ over the Church and over the world is not a fairy-tale or a gratuitous assertion, but a reality which “bites”. The apparatus of the Church has to be directed to that end…The total activity of the Church in its worship, its preaching, its teaching, its pastoral care should have the purpose of helping the “ordinary membership of the Church” to become what they are in Christ. (99-100)

Kraemer captures a number of our key concerns, arguing that the laity occupy a hugely significant position as those who bridge the world and the church and need to be equipped for this task and that this is indeed a high calling. He writes:

…the laity should...not be seen primarily as the needy, ignorant and helpless, but as that part of the Church that has to carry the brunt of the burden of encounter with the world in and around themselves, and to voice and incarnate the Church’s or better, Christ’s relevance to the whole range of human life. (114)

So, the laity need to be encouraged and resourced to live well in those contexts, for they exist as the "daily repeated projection of the Church in the world" (170). He continues...

If the specific place of the laity in the world is at the frontiers, where the real dialogue between Church and World becomes an event, the laity at large needs a new orientation, a new grasp of the whole realm and scale of the reality of Christ, and a new equipment. (172)

This will be a book that we wish to return to and there will be further posts exploring some of Kraemer's themes. However, in the meantime, here is a question that we've been asking ourselves: given that this book was written over 50 years ago, why are these ideas still relevant? Why was Kraemer's concern not listened to by the church at the time? How can this voice be heard again today?

5 Values For A Whole-life Disciplemaking Church: Intro

2010-04-27T12:53:00.004+01:00

How do you tell a whole-life disciplemaking church when you’ve got one? What should you look for? If you are a church leader, how do you tell when your work in shifting the culture is making a positive difference?

These are questions we frequently ask ourselves as a team. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to tell when a culture shift has begun to gain traction in the life of the church and to articulate what differences it is making. However, as our work in the church pilot project progressed it became increasingly clear that there are 5 core values that are central to a whole-life disciplemaking church that we believe provide a good guide to when a culture shift has begun:

Value 1: We submit to the Lordship of Christ in all things
Christ is Lord of All is a fundamental scriptural tenet (Col 1:16-17; Eph 1:22). As a community we are committed to exploring what ‘all things’ mean, recognising that no area of existence is excluded from God’s interest, purpose and redemptive power.

Value 2: We value everyone’s frontlines
Everyone has a frontline beyond the congregation, a place that they spend most of their time. We recognise that this place is enormously significant as a context for both mission and discipleship. We are committed to helping each other see the significance of the place that God has put us and how we may accompany Him in His purposes there.

Value 3: We connect the 10 and the 110
Whether gathered or scattered we are the church. We seek to connect these contexts together by 1) making the space to share what is happening when we are scattered, and 2) using the time we spend together (whether in meetings or socially) to support, equip, resource and encourage one another for the places we spend the rest of our time.

Value 4: We are active listeners
God speaks the first word and we respond to Him, accompanying Him. Therefore we are seeking to cultivate the skills of active listening and discernment. In a world of multiple distractions and claims on our attention, we seek to listen well to God and others.

Value 5: We are committed to growth as whole-life disciples
We recognise that we never ‘arrive’ as whole-life disciples. We recognise that our experiences can either shape us to become more like Christ or less, offering opportunities to grow or retreat. We therefore embrace our growth as disciples, wherever we are, whatever we face, whatever we do.

We seek to encourage the churches we are engaged with to actively explore these values in their lives together. Each of these values will already be present to a greater or lesser degree in the life of a church, flagging them as significant helps communities know what they are aiming for, and gives them a thermometer to measure the temperature of change in their context.

These values may be visible in a number of ways: in preaching, worship, conversation, décor, use of time, voices given weight and prominence etc., and manifest themselves both corporately and individually (both ‘I’ and ‘we’ need to value everyone’s frontlines for this to go beyond mere lip service).

The values are not exhaustive in the sense that whole-life discipleship has many dimensions and you may explore many, many other elements and ideas according to your context and the unique group of people in your congregation. However, they serve as a good guide as to whether a congregation is equipping one another as followers of Christ in the whole of life. Indeed, if any of these values are missing, then churches can become consumer-oriented, concentrating on the religious experiences that people will have whilst they are present at the corporate gatherings of the church to the detriment of enabling people to take seriously the call to live fruitfully in the whole of their lives.

Over a series of posts we will outline each of the values in more detail. In the meantime you might want to think about: how are these values manifest in your community? What would a community that embraced these values look like? Are there would be other elements you would add to the list?

NEW Imagine DVD Small Group Resource

2010-04-27T10:17:00.003+01:00

This new resource guides a small group through the themes, ideas and questions raised by the Imagine DVD. Over the course of 6 weeks, groups will grapple with the material and discover new ways of supporting and equipping one another as whole-life disciples.

To download this free new resource click here...

Conversations Journal: How We Change

2010-04-26T16:32:00.006+01:00

Conversations journal, published twice a year in the US, has devoted its latest issue to the question of How We Change.

As the editorial puts it:

...it has become commonplace to live as though what Jesus meant to be Christianity 101 - learning to live our lives with supernatural abilities - has become Christianity 401, a curriculum most reserve now for the saints.

So, they have devoted the latest issue to exploring the dimensions of change and growth. Coming out of the spiritual formation school it provides a certain take on the question and there is little on the role of the church in the transformation of the individual but with contributions from Dallas Willard, Larry Crabb, David Kinnaman and Ruth Haley Barton there is much for reflection.

To explore the contents and purchase a copy go to the Conversations website.

Gospel in Life: Grace Changes Everything

2010-04-23T13:11:00.006+01:00

The new DVD course Gospel in Life: Grace Changes Everything presented by Tim Keller from Redeemer Presbyterian Church, Manhatten is now available. Having watched the course DVD (in Black & White as the DVD is in NTSC format rather than PAL), we think it is an excellent resource for churches and small groups. The DVD features eight 10 minute films featuring Keller and is accompanied by a very thorough Participants Guide that contains session outlines and preparatory reading.

The DVD explores the gospel and how it is lived out in all of life. Bookended by a theology of the city, Keller, with typical clarity and depth, explores how Christians work out life and community in that context, remaining faithful whilst resisting the temptations of assimilation. As he says, "you work out the gospel in the city, in order to work the gospel into your own heart."

The 8 Sessions are:

City: The World That Is

Heart: Three Ways To Live

Idolatory: The Sin Behind The Sin

Community: The Context For Change
Witness: An Alternate City

Work: Cultivating The Garden

Justice: A People For Others

Eternity: The World That Is To Come

For more information and to purchase go to the Gospel in Life website.

Praying in the Plural

2010-04-19T08:00:00.002+01:00

How do the whole-life ideas shape the way we pray on our Frontlines?

There are varied responses we might want to give to this, but as a start here is a great and simple idea from a series preached by Robert Gelinas, lead pastor at Colorado Community Church and self-styled Jazz Theologian (It is well worth checking out his excellent blog) in September ‘09. Hear or download the talks here...

Over the course of six weeks, Gelinas explores a number of passages (2 Chron 6:18-21, James 1:1-5, Is 29:13-14, Eph 1:15-20, Eph 3:14-21, Mk 9:14-24) and emphasises that many prayers in the Bible are in the plural rather than the singular. Think, for example, of the Lord’s Prayer. The voice of the prayer is not 'me' but 'us'. But how often do we pray it in a way that recognises this?

Gelinas suggests that we model our prayer on this plural model:

Instead of I say we. Instead of me say us.

Obvious and simple really…but in practice life changing for Christians on the Frontline. When we face difficult or challenging situations our typical response when we pray is to ask God to help me (not a bad prayer). But it is unlikely that we are the only ones who are facing such a situation, so why not instead pray God help us.

So, for example, if you are facing redundancy at work, a person can and should legitimately pray God help me. But isn’t it better to pray God help us…and by so doing pray for colleagues who are facing the same situation, pray for the many other people also facing unemployment, pray for the implications for the company that this might have? As Gelinas points out at the beginning of the series ‘there is more of God than we need’.

We really like this idea and here is why:

1) It grows our understanding of God’s lordship – we begin to grasp something of how involved God is in the world in a way that extends beyond our own often limited horizons.

2) It creates a dramatic shift in perspective – facing difficult or challenging circumstances on our frontline it is easy to feel isolated. In a deeply individualistic culture, a ‘poor me’ response is a real temptation, feeling that we are the only ones who face such circumstances. Praying this way bursts that bubble and helps us see that we are not alone in the situations we face.

3) It is deeply empowering – praying in the plural means we come to God with not only our own situation but as a representative of many who are facing the same challenges.

4) It makes prayer more vibrant – Only being able to pray ‘help’ can be limiting. After we’ve prayed this we can feel like we are endlessly repeating the same things to God over and over again. Praying in the plural means that there are further dimensions to our prayers and once you begin to pray in this way new possibilities open up.

Why not try it and encourage people to give it a go and see how it might begin to transform how you pray?

Welcome

2010-04-18T15:11:00.013+01:00

Welcome to the new blog from LICC’s Imagine team.

A Quick Recap…
For those of you who are not familiar with the Imagine project, we are part of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity (LICC). The project began in 2003 with the publication of Imagine: How we can reach the UK by Mark Greene which argued for the recovery of whole-life disciplemaking as key to reaching the UK with the gospel: equipping the people of God to live with a vision of the Lordship of Christ that impacts every area of life as they engage day by day, in different contexts, schools, homes, daycentres, offices…

Since then the work of the Imagine project has led to two pilot projects, working with churches across the UK, exploring the ways in which churches can equip their people to engage fruitfully and faithfully in life as disciples of Jesus.

Why Are We Here?
Our intention in this space is to provide a context for exploring the wider dimensions of whole-life discipleship and engagement with others exploring similar territory. We hope to focus on seven areas in particular:

1) The Biblical and Theological Impetus for whole-life discipleship.
2) Missional Ecclesiology – how communities can support the growth of missional whole-life disciples.
3) The 10-110 Relationship – understanding and strengthening the relationship between the church gathered and scattered.
4) The Art of Culture Shift – the process by which communities transition to becoming whole-life embracing.
5) Leadership and the Disciplemaking Task – the implications for leadership in the whole-life disciplemaking church.
6) Life on the Frontline – engaging with life in the 110, at home, work and in leisure and exploring the implications for disciples of Jesus.
7) The dynamics of Growth and Maturity – exploration of the factors that contribute to or hinder growth.

Along the way, we also hope to use this blog as a context for sharing the stories of how people are growing as missionary disciples, examples of creative thinking from churches, and to draw attention to resources, books, articles and examples of good practice that we come across.

Meet the Team
The Brains, the Brawn and the Beauty who will be contributing to the blog…although there has been much disagreement as to who is who:

Neil Hudson is Imagine Project Director and facilitated the initial Imagine pilot project. He also continues to co-lead a church in Salford. At present he is busying himself producing a report on the Imagine project for publication at the end of 2010, since which he has offered other staff members cups of coffee on a more regular basis.

The charismatic Duracell bunny that is Chick Yuill leads our work in the North-West Pilot Project which commenced in 2009. He has spent 35 years in full-time church ministry and is well known to many as a speaker and writer.

Ben Care, who glories in the title of Imagine Project Facilitator, is involved in research, project evaluation and exploring the dynamics of change at a congregational level. He also smugly contents himself with being the only team member who can operate a PC...most days.

We hope you will accompany us on this journey and contribute your thoughts and ideas and that you will draw our attention to people and resources that we may not know about, so please do comment.

For more information about the project visit the Imagine area of the LICC website.