I've Been Thinking About This…

I was reading Dave Ferguson’s blog yesterday – he quoted some great words from a book by Roland Allen titled The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church. There are several quotes, but here’s the one that caught my eye:

Many years ago my experience in China taught me that if our object was to establish in that country a church which might spread over the six provinces which then formed the diocese of North China, that object could only be attained if the first Christians who were converted by our labors understood clearly that they could by themselves, without any further assistance from us, not only convert their neighbors, but establish churches. That meant that the very first groups of converts must be so fully equipped with all spiritual authority that they could multiply themselves without any necessary reference to us…

(my bold)

These are words that could as readily be applied to the church today – and 1,500 years ago. The book The Celtic Way of Evangelism: How Christianity Can Reach the West…Again… documents the way in which St Patrick was able to reach the Irish by adapting evangelistic methods to the indigenous people in Ireland and it spread like wildfire – and leapt back through Scotland and England and was starting back on the Continent when the Roman-based church put a stop to it – “That’s not the way we do it”.

We’re in the midst of a new way of ‘doing’ church that didn’t really get underway until the 1980s. For the first time since the first century, we are encouraging people to begin new churches without going through seminary first, and – by golly – they are! And we’ve got lots of ways of doing it. There are liturgical churches and anti-liturgical ones. There’s hippie radical worship (a VERY old congregation there!), and there’s churches that meet in pubs. It’s so terribly easy to criticize the way one group of people does church – so easy to promote the idea that REAL worship means getting dressed up in your best clothes out of respect for the Lord, and do not even think about bringing coffee into the service!

Don’t confuse method with message. As long as the message is true – let the method evolve, say I. What say you?

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