Derek Christensen on Equipping the Lay Mission Force

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.

Celebrating Vocation in Worship

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

Assumptions Behind the Movement for MDL

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.

Work in Progress

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

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

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

But the simple process can be summarised in three points:

A Theology of the Laity (1)

…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)