Please HONOR the copyright of these documents by not retransmitting or making any additional copies in any form (Except for private personal use). We appreciate your respectful cooperation. ___________________________ Theological Research Exchange Network (TREN) P.O. Box 30183 Portland, Oregon 97294 USA Website: www.tren.com E-mail: [email protected] Phone# 1-800-334-8736 ___________________________ ATTENTION CATALOGING LIBRARIANS TREN ID# Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) MARC Record # Digital Object Identification DOI # Ministry Focus Paper Approval Sheet This ministry focus paper entitled BROAD CHURCH TO THE NARROW WAY: MOVING FROM MEMBERSHIP TO EMPOWERED DISCIPLESHIP AT ST. THOMAS’ CHURCH Written by JOHN PAUL WESTIN and submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Ministry has been accepted by the Faculty of Fuller Theological Seminary upon the recommendation of the undersigned readers: _____________________________________ Keith Matthews _____________________________________ Kurt Fredrickson Date Received: February 10, 2014 BROAD CHURCH TO THE NARROW WAY: MOVING FROM MEMBERSHIP TO EMPOWERED DISCIPLESHIP AT ST. THOMAS’ CHURCH A DOCTORAL PROJECT SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY FULLER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE DOCTOR OF MINISTRY BY JOHN PAUL WESTIN JANUARY 2014 ABSTRACT Broad Church to Narrow Way: Moving From Membership to Empowered Discipleship at St. Thomas’ Church John Paul Westin Doctor of Ministry School of Theology, Fuller Theological Seminary 2014 The purpose of this project was to help church members to deepen their experience of the reality of God through an adult spiritual formation program that focused on the spiritual practices of service, prayer, worship, and study, within the context of small groups. It was intended to empower parishioners of St. Thomas’ Anglican Church in St. John’s, NL to live out their lives as committed followers of Jesus Christ. The program provides a process by which every adult member can move closer to Christ, beginning from their present level of engagement in the congregation. It used the specific spiritual practices of service, prayer, worship, and study, which were already part of the church’s life and history. These practices, applied in small group settings, engaged congregants cognitively, behaviorally, and affectively, in order to empower them to move from Church membership to Christian discipleship. Spiritual practices relating to a shared life with God, in the kingdom of God, are examined as they apply to the Anglican spiritual tradition and the local church. Weaknesses particular to the church’s tradition were identified and the inherent problems addressed. The ministry strategy plan with specific measurable goals, was developed and implemented to potentially reach all members. The final evaluation showed a measurable sense of empowerment among participating church members, as well as a positive movement in the congregation as a whole. An integrated assessment plan, covering every area of small group life in the parish and informing the leadership planning for subsequent years is outlined. This offers an ongoing annual process of renewal and empowerment for individual members, built into the structured pattern of life in the congregation. It is hoped that this program of empowering disciples can be adapted for use in other churches, with equally positive effects. Word count: 293 To the people of St. Thomas’ Church, my wife Carolyn, and daughters Anna, Miriam, and Lucia, who have shared this path of empowering Christian discipleship with me ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the following people, without whose personal support and practical assistance this project would not have been possible: my inspirational instructors Archibald Hart, Reggie McNeal, Richard Peace, and Dallas Willard (with adjuncts Jan Johnson and Keith Matthews); the Vestry of St. Thomas’ Church, and my Community of Support; my generous patron and mother Margaret Westin; the Continuing Education Fund of the Anglican Church of Canada, and the St. Lazarus Guild. I pray that the final product will be of help not only to the parishioners of St. Thomas’ but to all readers who seek a way to empowered Christian discipleship in their own context. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii INTRODUCTION 1 PART ONE: MINISTRY CHALLENGE Chapter 1. THE ORIGINS OF AN UNIQUE COMMUNITY 9 Chapter 2. SPECIFIC MINISTRY CONTEXT FOR ST. THOMAS’ CHURCH 27 PART TWO: THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION Chapter 3. LITERATURE REVIEW 52 Chapter 4. THEOLOGY OF THE CHURCH 71 Chapter 5. A RENEWED THEOLOGY OF ANGLICAN DISCIPLESHIP 88 PART THREE: MINISTRY STRATEGY Chapter 6. THEOLOGY IN PRACTICE: GOALS AND PLANS 105 Chapter 7. IMPLEMENTATION AND ASSESSMENT 118 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 142 APPENDICES 148 BIBLIOGRAPHY 164 iv INTRODUCTION Nearly fifty years ago the Christian and Canadian philosopher George Grant wrote his landmark work Lament for a Nation. It is generally considered one of the most important books to come out of Canada in the last century. In it he lamented the loss of nationalism to continentalism, and the uniqueness of Canadian culture to the homogenizing domination of American liberal capitalism and its technological power. He later admitted he wrote out of both anger and nostalgia for the formerly unique nation that “was once a nation with meaning and purpose.”1 Grant argued “Canada- immense and under populated, defined by a shared border, history, and culture with the United States, and torn by conflicting loyalties to Britain, Quebec, and America - had ceased to exist as a sovereign state.”2 Grant lamented the loss of Canadian culture and uniqueness in the face of what he saw as a vast and uncontrollable cultural surge from the United States. He felt Canada missed its opportunity to take a narrow and unique path as a nation, and opted for the broad and destructive (of Canadian uniqueness) path of continental North Americanism. Many of his fears were well-warranted; others never came to be. Canada remains a separate, if somewhat culturally closer, sovereign nation sharing the world’s largest unprotected border with its southern neighbors. Fifteen years later, British political analyst Malcolm Muggeridge, a convert from atheism to Christianity, lamented the loss of another, far greater culture: that of the 1 George Grant, Lament for a Nation, 40th Anniversary Edition (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2005), Forward. 2 Ibid. 1 Western Christian Church. Like Grant, he was greatly concerned for the losses being incurred on almost every cultural front but, unlike his earlier co-watchman, yet he remained hopeful even while raising the lament and alarm. In his influential short work The End of Christendom, Muggeridge argued that while Christendom may well be dead, Christianity was far from dead. The broad, destructive road of Western worldly power, exercised through institutions and governments tied to the historic cultural of Christendom, may well be leading to a dead- end, but the heart of the whole culture of Christendom, and the reason it ever developed in the first place, remains untouched. Christianity, as opposed to Christendom, the system that grew up around it like a great barnacle that has grown and overwhelmed a ship’s hull, has at its heart the relationship between disciples and the Lord Jesus Christ, which is the essence and narrow way of the Christian faith. He wrote, Christendom, however, is something quite different from Christianity, being the administrative or power structure, based on the Christian religion and constructed by men. It bears the same relation to the everlasting truth of the Christian revelation as, say, laws do to justice, or morality to goodness, or carnality to love- if you like, as Augustine’s City of God to the earthly city where we temporarily live.3 Almost everything Muggeridge saw happening, or coming on the horizon, in regard to the receding power of Christian culture in the West seems to have been accurate. Yet he wrote hopefully, “So, amidst the shambles of a fallen Christendom, I feel a renewed confidence in the light of the Christian revelation with which it first began.”4 3 Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom (Grand Rapids, MI: William. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1980), 13. 4 Ibid., 23. 2 Author and missionary bishop Lesslie Newbigin agreed with Muggeridge’s renewed confidence. He too was filled with glad expectation for the propagation of the Christian gospel. In his classic work Foolishness to the Greeks Newbigin took on the full force of the Western cultural Goliath with five small chapters intended to bring the modern world into a dialogue with the true Gospel of Jesus Christ. He contrast the true Gospel with the quantified, qualified, and neutralized shell of a gospel, after it had been gutted by the modern Western mindset. He challenged the universally accepted inheritance from the Enlightenment period that “this dichotomy between the private and the public worlds (which) is fundamental to modern Western culture” and he breathed new life and hope into the mission fields of Europe and North America of his day.5 Most Christian leaders are familiar with the lament for the state of the Christian Church in the western world. Many agree with the secular reading on the statistical life of the Church in North America, and especially in Canada, that, with few exceptions, it seems to be in a state of serious and irreversible decline. Yet, at the same time there are other voices that speak of great hope and opportunity in this day and age. Reginald Bibby, the foremost sociologist of religion in Canada, like Muggeridge and Newbigin before him, sees reason for hope for those congregations that want to change, even as he chronicles the dismal slide of Canadian church establishments into political and social oblivion. The broad path of the Christendom way is drawing to its close, but the narrow path of relational relevance for religion is not going to run its course in the foreseeable future.