The Oadby Evangelical Free Church blog

Here's an excellent summary of the MGP Leicester event last Wednesday by Tim Ward - Vicar of Holy Trinity Hinckley. Tim is one of the local steering commitee of MGP Leciester.

For those who missed it, here’s a summary of what we heard last night from Tim Chester, on the topic of “Everyday Church: mission by being good neighbours”. Tim is a leader of the ‘Crowded House’ network of churches in Sheffield. I think that what he is saying is vital for us to hear:

One in three of today’s 70-year-olds went to Sunday School as children.
Today only 4% of children go to Sunday School.
That means that attracting ‘returners’ to church by doing the right kind of service to attract them will very soon stop working. However, in many growing churches most new people being attracted in have some church background. That pool of people is drying up fast.
Therefore churches need to make three shifts:
1. From doing to being. Church is not a meeting or a service to attend, it’s a community to belong to. Mission is done primarily in ordinary life, not in meetings.
2. From Sunday to every day. Christians need to be discipled in the context of everyday life. It’s right to be a Bible-teaching church - but that’s no good on its own. We need to be Bible-learning, Bible-living and Bible-loving churches.
3. From a ‘Christendom’ mind-set to a missional mind-set. ‘Christendom’ is the notion that the culture around us ought in some way to be Christian, and ought to act like the church in some ways. Christendom is dying, and there’s no point trying to resurrect it. We need to start think and acting like missionaries in an alien culture, getting to know the culture we live in.

In the New Testament, in 1 Peter, a ‘mission strategy’ is found which exactly fits the culture we now live in:
1. Mission in the every-day (1 Peter 2.11-12). Think of your regular routines – the daily ones, the weekly ones, and the monthly ones. Then ask these questions: How could I do those things together with another Christian? Now, how could I also do some of those things together with someone who’s not a Christian? Finally, how can I get those two people talking together, so that my non-Christian friend starts to get friendly with several Christians?
2. Misson in community (1 Peter 3.8-15). Lots of Christians feel useless at obeying v.15 (i.e. telling non-Christians about the hope we have). But what should provoke non-Christians to ask about faith is not mainly them seeing my life or your life individually, but seeing our lives together (which is what vs.8ff talk about). Mission should therefore be about everyday contact between non-Christians and Christian community (not just individual Christians). We should be asking: how can we introduce non-Christians we know to everyday Christian community? The programmes of activity in many churches often get in the way of this, rather than fostering it.
[end of summary.]

For my money, it’s this last point, ‘mission in community’, which brings the rubber into sharp contact with the road. Some of us are already operating like this naturally, of course, but arguably it’s not central to how our church life is structured.

HT Tim Ward