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Ministry Focus Paper Approval Sheet
This ministry focus paper entitled
TRANSITIONING HEATHMONT BAPTIST CHRCH TO A DISCIPLE-MAKING MISSIONAL CONGREGATION
Written by
STEPHEN ROGGERO
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:
______Graham Buxton
______Kurt Fredrickson
Date Received: February 28, 2013
TRANSITIONING HEATHMONT BAPTIST CHURCH TO A DISCIPLE-MAKING MISSIONAL CONGREGATION
A MINISTRY FOCUS PAPER 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 STEPHEN ROGGERO FEBRUARY 2013
ABSTRACT
Transitioning Heathmont Baptist Church to a Disciple-Making Missional Congregation Stephen Roggero Doctor of Ministry School of Theology, Fuller Theological Seminary 2013
The purpose of this ministry focus paper was to help Heathmont Baptist Church become a missional, disciple–making congregation, through the formation of a missional understanding and through transforming small groups from being inwardly- oriented to being outwardly- focused as disciples in mission. Heathmont and its surrounding suburbs are typical of metropolitan Melbourne, with a family orientation and homes on a quarter- of -an-acre block. The potential for a renewed effort to engage missionally in the community is real, however rising agnosticism and atheism along with consumerism and individualism provides an ever increasing challenge. To address this, this paper created a strategy for cultivating a refocus on mission and discipleship with the purpose of seeing people from the wider community becoming Christ-followers. Central to the strategy was the formation of missional understanding amongst members of the congregation and the redevelopment of small groups. Part One told the history and current description of Heathmont Baptist Church. It described the development of the vision of a church towards mission. Cultural challenges were also outlined. Part Two established the theological foundations for this project, including ecclesiological influences and patterns from the Baptist framework. This section focused on the theological examination of discipleship and the implications of this for Christian community and mission. The relevance of these conclusions to the project strategy were outlined. Part Three described the strategy, goals, plan and implementation of the project. This section outlined the specifics of the project - a teaching program to shape missional understanding, and small group participation with a model that would enable members to express Christian community as disciples in mission. Part three covered the project’s timeline, structure and leadership resourcing. This section also provided careful assessment of the project, including reflection on lessons learned and consideration of future steps.
Words: 295 Content Reader: Dr. Graham Buxton
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Heathmont Baptist Church for the generous contribution of time, resources and support towards the completion of this project. I am grateful to belong to a community of faith willing to dream the dream and do the work of following Jesus Christ in His mission that we might see the transformation in people’s lives. Thank you to my assistant Melanie for her generous support with the time, energy and editing assistance she provided. Thanks also to the staff at the Doctor of Ministry office for their willing availability to offer assistance. Special thanks to my wife and partner Sue, who over the lengthy period of my studies has always been eager to encourage and support my journey. Thank you for being the faithful, loving and fun companion you have been in our 23 years of marriage. And thank you to my eleven-year-old son Ricky who displayed great patience and understanding in the demanding final year of my study, and for making me those cups of coffee to keep me “keeping on.”
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv
INTRODUCTION 1
PART ONE: MINISTRY CONTEXT
Chapter 1. THE CULTURAL CONTEXT OF HEATHMONT 9 BAPTIST CHURCH
Chapter 2. DESCRIPTION OF HEATHMONT BAPTIST CHURCH: PAST AND PRESENT 25
PART TWO: BIBLICAL AND THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION
Chapter 3. REVIEW OF LITERATURE 52
Chapter 4. A THEOLOGY OF THE CHURCH AS DISCIPLES–IN–MISSION 75
Chapter 5. A THEOLOGY OF DISCIPLESHIP 100
PART THREE: STRATEGY
Chapter 6. STRATEGIES FOR CULTIVATING DISCIPLES-IN-MISSION 124
Chapter 7. IMPLEMENTATION AND ASSESSMENT 141
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 169
APPENDICES 173
BIBLIOGRAPHY 177
v
INTRODUCTION
I sat with the senior pastor search team and looked over the position description of the senior pastor they were seeking for Heathmont Baptist Church. There was a clear resonance between the key desired objectives on paper and my desire to lead and serve such a direction with a church community. The key desired result areas stated firstly, that the senior pastor would lead the church into missional engagement. Second and third key desired areas included the development of leaders and the preaching and teaching for spiritual growth of the congregation. However, it was the first key desired area that prompted excitement and concern, both at the same time: excitement that God may be leading me to a good match between a congregation’s heart and my own heart, and concern that this congregation and its search committee and governing Church Council did not yet grasp the immense gap between the inherent inward focus of the Heathmont
Church and its stated desire to be missional.
I asked first the search committee and then the Church Council, “Are you sure you and the congregation really want to move in this direction?” The answer was, “Yes!
It’s the church’s last chance to stave off irrelevancy and decline.” I discovered that the church congregation had been led through some workshop seminars by a denominational missional consultant in the process of creating the senior pastor position description.
However, my concern lay in the fact of having observed numerous situations where, after the senior pastor’s arrival at a church, there was the discovery of a sizeable gap between what the leadership had prioritized and what the majority of people in the congregation believed was the priority for the senior pastor. I was given assurances by the church
1
leadership, and God confirmed to both my wife Sue and I, that this church, Heathmont
Baptist was where He was leading us to serve the cause of leading a faith community to be disciples-in-mission. That was the end of 2008. I was inducted into the position
February 2009.
In May 2011 the congregation of Heathmont Baptist Church adopted a Five Year
Strategic Plan that reflects the vision statement: “A Missional Caring Community
Making Disciples and Building the Kingdom of God in Melbourne and Beyond.” Five full-time and part-time pastors had been recruited in the preceding two years to join the
Ministry Staff team and were key contributors to the process of the church congregation adopting this vision and strategy. What I suspected prior to my arrival also eventuated.
There is a gap between the congregation’s stated agreement to seek to be missional and their actual willingness to act and engage in this way. There is a tension between the congregation’s desire and habit for comfort and the familiarity of fellowship, and the discomfort and discontinuity that change brings about in moving the congregation towards an outward focus.
The change has involved notably, the recruitment of pastors with the primary gift of “leadership” for the equipping of the people for mission and ministry. This represented a shift from a pastoral care orientated style of leading that is more akin to the ministry of chaplaincy. There was also the changing of the church constitution empowering accountable leadership with the aim of maximizing mission and minimizing maintenance.
This was adopted at a church members meeting by a near two-thirds majority of the members, and the expression of a more contemporary and entrepreneurial approach to
2
church ministry. Notwithstanding the tensions and dissatisfaction amongst some of the members, the Church Council has been strong and united in the commitment to support the senior pastor’s leadership of the church towards mission. Once the structures, constitutions, staffing were in place, the task focused on how to facilitate the congregation of Heathmont Baptist Church to transition to be truly missional in its ministry and expression of faith community. The main goal of this project is to help transition Heathmont Baptist from an inward focused, fellowship oriented church to being a missional disciple-making community.
Heathmont Baptist Church, located in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne in the state of Victoria, Australia, is a medium-to-large sized church with five hundred men, women and children who call the church their spiritual home. It grew particularly in the decade of the 1980s as the suburban region grew with new housing and increased population. Since that time the church has hovered around these numbers; going up and down in various years depending on the issues going on in the church at the time. Like many other Baptist churches in greater Melbourne, Heathmont has been caught in an
“attractional” ministry methodology with a dissipated expression of discipleship.
Attractional in that the focus was on attracting people to “come to” the church site. The key ministry focus involved running solid church worship services with good preaching and well-presented music and worship leading. It also involved being a “friendly” welcoming church and running programs such as an on-site kindergarten, men’s and women’s activities.
3
Strategies and programs of the church focused on gathering church members primarily for teaching and fellowship experiences. People gathered to hear God’s word primarily in Sunday church services and weekly small groups, and fellowshipped socially in and around these occasions, but there was little expression of people living out discipleship holistically and missionally in their neighborhood or place of employment or education. This combination of “attractional” methodology and “watered down” expression of discipleship resulted in an inward focus of church life and ministry. This was particularly apparent in small groups, which were then called Connect Groups but are now called Life groups. Life groups which, for years have been regarded by church leadership as the “engine room” of the church, had developed the modus operandi of people gathering each week in someone’s home, doing a Bible study together, praying and then socializing over coffee and cake. This became the primary vehicle for what was called discipleship. My contention is this expression of discipleship does not meet adequately the description of discipleship modeled and taught by Jesus in the Gospels. It has resulted in the expression of a false concept of what a disciple is in the member’s
Kingdom life. Alan Hirsch maintains that this situation is a general problem in the
Western Church: “The dilemma we face today in regard to the issue is that while we have a historical language of discipleship, our actual practice of discipleship is far from consistent … I think it is fair to say that in the Western Church, we have by and large lost the art of disciple-making.”1
1 Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2006), 103-104.
4
The result of the problem is that the expression of the Christ follower as a “sent one” has been lost at Heathmont Baptist. It is the challenge to turn inwardness to a missional engagement based on a sound theology of discipleship that forms the main goal of this final project. After much thought and reflection, I discerned that the starting point to facilitate the next phase of this transition at Heathmont Baptist was to first, address the teaching program to facilitate understanding of the Gospel’s call on the Christ follower’s life and second, to address the role, function and operation of Life groups. This involved facilitating the transformation of Life groups to being faith communities of disciples actually engaged in mission.
To address the ministry challenge, this Ministry focus paper contains three major sections. Part 1 focuses on the ministry context of Heathmont Baptist Church. Chapter 1 describes the location, demographics and challenge presented by increasing secularization of society which has resulted in consumerism, pluralization and disconnectedness impacting the life and ministry of Heathmont Baptist Church.
Chapter 2 describes the journey of the church from its inception to present day, from its growth to its plateau, and describes the formation of the church’s purpose to engage in disciple–making shaped by mission, and changes implemented to facilitate this.
This chapter also identifies challenges which exist to arrest the drift to a consumerist,
“me-centered” form of church expression in place of a Holy Spirit shaped discipleship consistent with New Testament principles.
Part 2 establishes the theological foundations for this project. Chapter 3 explores how discipleship and mission are unreservedly central to the nature and function of the
5
church, and thus sets the priority for disciples–in–mission based church ministry. Chapter
4 outlines the ecclesiological heritage of Heathmont Baptist Church, discussing the strengths and weaknesses. Biblical reflection and discussion on theology of the church lays a foundation for understanding the purposes and intent of the church as the sent people of God, particularly in how this informs the strategy to discipleship based mission.
Chapter 5 discusses the theology of discipleship and the implications for Christian community, mission, leadership and small groups. The inextricable relationship between discipleship and mission is explored, leading to the conclusion that discipleship cannot be separated from mission.
Part 3 of the Ministry Focus Paper provides the plan and strategy for the development of missional formation amongst the people of Heathmont Baptist Church, and the redevelopment of the Life groups ministry to be disciples-in-mission communities. Chapter 6 outlines a plan for discipleship-based community engaging in mission through the redevelopment of small groups, resulting in people’s lives outside
Heathmont Baptist Church being transformed by the witness of the Gospel. This includes cultivating an understanding amongst members as to what the calling of the Gospel entails on their lives, and what it means to be Spirit-shaped disciples: being followers of
Jesus sharing community on the journey of mission.2 Chapter 6 also outlines the steps taken to cultivate the practice of Life group members taking a missional conversation to the community whereby the Kingdom of God is proclaimed and people’s lives are transformed. The strategy will also include the aspect of the training of Life group leaders
2 For the purposes of this Project, the use of the word members henceforth is applied to mean those who are active attendees of the church through the participation with the church’s ministries. 6
for the task of effectively facilitating the journey of their groups to being disciples–in– mission communities. Also, resources necessary for meeting this ministry challenge is considered.
Chapter 7 firstly presents the implementation strategy for the provision of church– wide teaching for the development of an understanding by the members regarding the call of the Gospel and discipleship based mission. Next, a project to steer the redevelopment of the Life groups small group program at Heathmont Baptist Church is presented, starting with a project summary and time-line along with discussion of the training and resources required to execute the strategy. An assessment analysis of the project will be provided and the paper will conclude with a report on the findings and how these results are to be integrated going forward.
7
PART ONE
MINISTRY CONTEXT
CHAPTER 1
THE CULTURAL CONTEXT OF HEATHMONT BAPTIST CHURCH
Heathmont Baptist Church is located in the suburb of Heathmont in the outer east of Melbourne surrounded by three different metropolitan regions. The homes of the members of Heathmont Baptist are spread across these regions. The locality of the church according to the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics, has a significant spread of people’s occupational status. The top 5 occupations are: professionals – 9 percent, intermediate clerical/sales/service – 9 percent, tradespersons and related workers – 6 percent, associated Professional – 6 percent and elementary clerical/sales/service – 5 percent.1 The top 5 categories for education are listed as: non attending (working) – 77 percent, infants/primary – 8 per cent, secondary education – 6 percent, university or other tertiary institution – 4 percent, technical or further education – 3 percent.2
The socio-economic status of the surrounding area is like the majority of
Melbourne suburbs: middle class. However being a distance of more than thirty
1 Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Maroondah (C) – Ringwood Code 205554412 (SLA)http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/getproduct/census/2011/quickstat/205554412?op endocument&navpos=220 http://www.abs.gov.au (accessed January 4, 2012).
2 Ibid. 9
kilometers from the central business district of Melbourne, the area is mainly at the middle-to-lower-middle end of the middle-class spectrum. This is highlighted by the relatively low percentage of those categorized as “Professionals” at just 8 percent.3 In relation to those categorized as low income, the region has a higher than average number of people in this category.
In regards to ethnicity, the Australian Bureau of Statistics registers 65 percent as
Australian-born, followed by 5 percent from the United Kingdom. The region has a much higher ratio of white Anglo-Saxon background populace than many other parts of
Melbourne. These statistics are indicative of the make-up of the Heathmont Baptist
Church, which has a very high ratio of Australian-born, white Anglo-Saxon ethnicity.
There are signs though that this is about to change. Recently at my son’s primary school
(for children aged 5-12), I attended the first assembly of the year where they welcomed new students. A significant number of students were Australian-born, but of Asian origin.
Data that is particularly pertinent to the context of the missional challenge of Heathmont
Baptist Church is that referring to age, demographics and religious belief. The suburbs surrounding where the church is situated ranges from 21 percent to 25 percent of the populace being aged five-to-nineteen, in contrast to the wider city average of 14 percent.4
Other age groups are fairly close to the citywide average. This highlights the significant mission opportunity that lies in the field of children and young families, as well as youth and young adults.
3 Ibid., (accessed April 1, 2012).
4 Ibid. 10
The Use of the Car
Transportation has some implications on the ministry challenge being addressed in this paper. Thirty-three percent of people who live in the region choose the car as their mode of transportation to travel to work (31 percent as the driver, 2 percent as a passenger). On the future of Melbourne by 2031, Sir Rod Eddington wrote:
While about 1.5 million trips will be made by public transport each day in Melbourne, almost ten times as many trips (14 million) will still be made by motor vehicles. While there are geographic and social reasons for this, people's mobility is also important to their sense of personal freedom. Even in an era of carbon constraint, people will choose to allocate some of their carbon “ration” to mobility.5
In a report by the Institute of Transport Studies at Monash University, analysis of the 2006 Census concluded that, “Out of the 1 million (valid) households in the 2001 census tabulations, some 10 percent had no car, 38 percent had one car and 52 percent two or more cars.”6 They also reported that even in the case of low-income families who would have more reason to not afford the expenses associated with owning a car, 95.5 percent of people had at least one car.7 The existence of the car as the dominant mode of transportation in suburban Melbourne means that high mobility is a feature of the life for the people who live in the neighborhoods around Heathmont Baptist Church. This has implications for mission, which will be commented on a little further on, as it is associated with the factor of the home ownership dream.
5 Sir Rod Eddington, “Melbourne on the move,” The Age, 29 May 2008, http://www.theage. com.au/news/opinion/rod-eddington/2008/05/28/1211654119844.html (accessed June 1, 2011).
6 Graham Currie and Zed Senbergs, “Exploring forced car ownership in metropolitan Melbourne” Australasian Transport Research Forum 2007, 4.
7 Ibid.
11
The Great Australian Dream of Home Ownership
Australians have largely had a long held dream to have their own quarter-of-an- acre block of land with their house, garage for the car(s) and a backyard for the children to play in. A large sprawling city of more than four million people, greater metropolitan
Melbourne has seen the evolution of desired smaller space living, where demand to live there out-numbers the dwellings available to accommodate this demand. However, in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, such as the suburbs around Heathmont Baptist Church, the dream for home ownership on a quarter-of-an-acre block is alive and well. The following quotation from an article in a leading Melbourne newspaper called the Herald Sun in
November 2011, exemplifies the attitude held by many in the middle to outer Melbourne suburbs:
Apartment dwellers were being treated like criminals and the State Government should do more to encourage high density living, says a top architect. Craig Yelland is sick of people knocking apartment living. He urged Melbournians to dump the “great Australian dream” of owning a house. “The perception is that everyone wants a house and you only live in an apartment if you can't afford a house,” he said. “It's like people who are living in apartments are criminals.”8
The social and economic impact on people seeking to live this dream is far reaching and there is a relationship between the impact of this data and the data that reveals people’s dependency on ownership of the motorcar as the main form of transport.
One is the impact of a loss of “community” in society. Robert Putnam puts it as the loss of “social capital.” According to Putnam, the central premise of social capital is that
8 John Masanauskas, “Life can have its highs in a flat,” The Herald Sun, November 14, 2011, http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/more-news/life-can-have-its-highs-in-a-flat/story-fn7x8me2- 1226193958973 (accessed May 12, 2012).
12
social networks have value: “By social capital I mean features of social life – networks, norms and trust – that enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue shared objectives.”9 In Putnam’s pioneering study, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and
Revival of American Community, he shows how people have become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and our democratic structures – and how we may reconnect. John Becker comments on Putnam’s work:
Based on analyses of large datasets and evidence from nearly 500,000 interviews over the last quarter century, Putnam (2000) concludes that our stock of social capital – the very fabric of our connections with each other, has dropped dramatically, thus impoverishing our lives and communities. He documents that we sign fewer petitions, belong to fewer organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, meet with friends less frequently, and even socialize with our families less often. We are even bowling alone. More Americans are bowling than ever before, but they are not bowling in leagues. In other words, we are increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and our democratic structures. Putnam (2000) offers a number of reasons for this collapse of community in America. Among those reasons, time pressure, especially on two-career families, is considered one of the primary suspects., changes in family structures mean more and more of us are living alone and conventional means to civic engagement are not designed around single and/or childless people. Also, suburban sprawl is an important contributor to the loss of community as we live further away from one another and further away from cultural and civic centers.10
Whilst Putnam references America, the same can be said of life in Australia. The mission of the Christ-following church faces a challenge with the changes that have occurred to the experience of “community.” The drive to earn enough money to fund the dream of
9 Robert Putnam, “The Strange Disappearance of Civic America,” The American Prospect (Winter, 1996), 66.
10 John Becker wrote this in an article published in a peer-reviewed (not open access) journal and reprinted it on his website Educational Insanity: edinsanity.com on June 28 2008. http://edinsanity.com/2008/06/28/bowling-alone-vs-here-comes-everybody-my-how-far-weve-come/ (accessed April 1, 2012).
13
having one’s own home and having the car to get to and from work, has resulted in a more consumer-oriented existence that is more focused on the individual family unit. In
Melbourne in 2009, the average mortgage for the purchase of new dwellings was
$307,600, more than four times the average annual wage.11 This gives a picture of new and mainly first homebuyers accumulating a more than significant mortgage debt to fund the dream.
The suburban dream of owning one’s own home along with the mobility provided by a car driving culture, has resulted in the erosion of local community as people become time poor and struggle to connect with even the neighbors who live next door. In the street I reside in the suburb of Heathmont we have a street Christmas party each year where occupants from some eighty homes are invited. That was until Christmas of 2011 where people were too busy to make it. At the last Christmas party held in 2010 many noted they had not properly spoken to their nearest neighbors for the entire year, since the previous Christmas party.
The chase for the suburban dream of having one’s plot of land with house and car in a larger geographical region where people mainly travel by motorcar to-and-from places, has contributed to the impact of high mobility. People travel outside of their local community to work, to meet up with friends, to play or watch sport, to visit family members. For the minority of the population that worship at church, many of those of an evangelical persuasion will also travel outside their local community to participate in a
11 Australian Bureau of Statistics Source: 5609.0 Housing Finance, Australia. Table 10c. Owner Occupation, http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/[email protected]/Lookup/ 5609.0Main+Features1Oct%202011 ?OpenDocument (accessed December 30, 2011). 14
church that they feel most comfortable with. The challenge presented by this mobility to spheres outside of the immediate location where people live, is in how community becomes defined, and how Church members who are part of the broader culture live out the sense of being a “community of faith.” Furthermore, if the Church is to be a community of faith in mission in its locality, the challenge lies for how mission occurs within a disparate community where people are constantly moving about in the day-to- day activities.
Religious Belief
Data on religious belief from the 2011 census accentuates the challenge that lies for Christ following, kingdom of God announcing mission. The category of “no religion” in the State of Victoria shifted from 20 percent in 2006 to 24 percent in 2011.12 The populace from the areas surrounding Heathmont Baptist Church showed a slightly more favorable result with 27.9 percent of people citing “no religion” in 2011 as against 24.3 percent in 2006. There was a lesser drift in the category of people indicating themselves as “Christians;” 59.5 percent of people marked the category “Christian” in 2011, whereas in 2006 it was 60.6 percent.13
However, there has been significant decline in those who declared adherence to a church. In the region where Heathmont Baptist Church is situated, the 2011 census showed marked decline amongst the largest denominations since the 2006 Census. The
12 Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Themes: People and Cultural Diversity.” http://www. censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/getproduct/census/2011/quickstat/2 (accessed September 24, 2012).
13 Ibid.
15
figures show the Catholic moving from 27.1 percent to 22.9 percent, Anglican from 15.9 percent to 14.3 and Uniting Church from 5.9 percent to 5.3 percent.14 Baptists, along with other evangelical denominations, had fewer declines; in fact in the case of Baptists and
Pentecostals there was increase, although slight. In the city of Maroondah, in 2006,
Baptists comprised 3.1 percent of the populace. In 2011 it was 3.8 percent and the
Pentecostals grew from 1.4 percent to 1.5 percent.15 Nevertheless, the low percentage of
Baptists and Pentecostals in the overall population and the decline of the mainstream
Christian churches highlights the extent to which the Church is increasingly on the margins of society.
To illustrate the challenge facing Christian mission, in the 1996 Census, 68 percent of the population classified themselves as Christian.16 In the 2011 Census, 55.8 percent classified themselves as Christian, representing a 13 percent decline. In the City of Maroondah Community Profile, the 2011 Census reveals declining numbers of
Catholic and Anglican adherents, but an increase in “other Christians.”17 However as the
14 Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Census of Population and Housing 2006 and 2011.” Compiled and presented by .id, the population experts, http://profile.id.com.au/maroondah/religion (accessed September 24, 2012).
15 Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Census of Population and Housing 2006 and 2011.” Compiled and presented by .id, the population experts, http://profile.id.com.au/maroondah/religion (accessed September 24, 2012).
16 Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Census Characteristics of Victoria.” www.abs.gov.au catalogue number 2710.2, 63 (accessed September 21, 2012).
17 The largest changes in the religious affiliation of the population in Ringwood between 2001 and 2011 were for those who nominated: Baptist (+265 persons), Other Christian (+232 persons), Catholic (- 182 persons), Anglican (-280 persons), and Uniting Church (-167 persons). Maroondah City Council Community Profile, Ibid. http://profile.id.com.au/maroondah/religion?EndYear= 2001&WebID=180&Data Type=en (accessed September 20, 2012).
16
statistics above reveal, this category of “other Christians” still only accounts for a small percentage of the population.
A further local demographic reality is that although Australia and greater
Melbourne is experiencing a changing pattern of religious persuasion, the region surrounding Heathmont Baptist Church has been experiencing less of a rate of growth in other religions. Buddhism is the largest religious grouping outside of Christianity in the surrounding region. In the city of Maroondah between 2001 and 2006 there was only a
0.1 percent increase of people who classified themselves as Buddhist, from 1.2 percent to
1.3 percent.18 In the City of Knox, another larger city adjacent to Heathmont, the rate of increase amongst Buddhists was 0.5 percent from 2.4 percent to 2.9 percent.19 This highlights the fact that in the wider region around Heathmont Baptist, people have in the main a white Anglo-Saxon background. Where people have indicated a religious persuasion it is chiefly a largely Christian background. What is noteworthy, however, is that whilst the region may have a limited physical presence of diverse religious beliefs in terms of population representation, there is nevertheless the impact of prevailing wider social norms of religious pluralism within the greater society throughout greater
Melbourne and the nation of Australia.
18 Ibid.
19 Knox City Council Community Profile, http://profile.id.com.au/Default.aspx?id =114&pg=106&gid=10&type=enum (accessed October 1, 2012).
17
The source of the religious pluralism lies in Australia’s post-war migration:
As a result of post-war migration Australia has become a religiously plural, multicultural society. Following a careful examination of recent changes in the religious demography of Australia, a comparison of Australia with Canada and New Zealand, and a discussion of the nature of religiously plural, multicultural societies, six factors (three demographic and three social structural) are identified as key in reducing the likelihood of religious intergroup conflict in Australia: The relatively small size of the minority groups vis-à-vis the dominant but nearly equal Catholics and Anglicans, the lack of overlap between ethnic and religious difference, the lack of ghettoization, the fact that religious difference is not politicized, a long history of sorting out intergroup conflict through legislation and courts, and the existence of effective organizations promoting positive intergroup relations.20
The prevailing norms of religious plurality and the acceptance and respect of others’ beliefs or non-beliefs have been and are championed through the mediums of education, the media, (including television, cable and print or online journalism), government law statutes. In Australian society the popular culture is that of acceptance of religious diversity including agnosticism or atheism. This has contributed to a culture where any sense of a one true God is not socially palatable.
Postmodernism
Integral to this challenging cultural context is the emergence of postmodern influences, particularly of relativism, and the erosion of the notion of objective truth. This presents major challenges for the Christ-follower seeking to proclaim the Gospel of
Kingdom of God through Jesus Christ. N.T. Wright writes of the impact of the move from modernism to postmodernism:
20 Gary D. Bouma, “The Emergence of Religious Plurality in Australia: A Multicultural Society,” Sociology of Religion 56.3 (1995), 285-302. 18
First, knowledge and truth. Where modernism thought it could know things objectively about the world, postmodernism has reminded us that there is no such thing as neutral knowledge. Everybody has a point of view, and that point of view distorts. Everybody describes things the way that suits them. There is no such thing as objective truth. Likewise, there are no such things as objective values, only preferences …The cultural symbols that encapsulate this revolution are the personal stereo and the virtual-reality screen; everyone creates their own private world. Second, the self. Modernity vaunted the great lonely individual, the all-powerful “I,” symbolized perfectly in Descartes’s cogito ergo sum and in the proud claim, “I am the master of my fate … the captain of my soul.” But postmodernity has deconstructed the self, the “I.” The “I” now may be just a floating signifier, a temporary and accidental meeting place of conflicting forces and impulses. Just as reality collapses inward upon the knower, the knower deconstructs itself. Third, the story. Modernity implied a narrative about the way the world was. It was essentially an eschatological story … This huge overarching story–now has been conclusively shown to be an oppressive, imperialist, and self-serving construct … It is a story that serves the interest of Western industrial capitalism. Modernity stands condemned of building a new tower of Babel. Postmodernity has gone on to claim, primarily with this great metanarrative as the example, that all metanarratives are suspect. They are all power games.21
As Wright concludes, “We live in a cultural, economic, moral, and even religious smorgasbord. ‘Pick-n-mix’ is the order of the day.”22 One might term a description of postmodern culture as that of “shopping.” The world and all of history is likened to a vast supermarket where people pick out the ingredients they like and assemble them into their own version of life’s meaning or purpose. Mark Sayers, to the question “is postmodernity dead?” recently answered:
No is the short answer. Postmodernity is no longer marked by complicated conversations held in the stuffy halls of academia, or over white wine in pristine white art galleries. Postmodernity is alive and well in a new kind of form. An implicit, lived postmodernity, acted out by average people in cities and suburbs.
21 N.T Wright, “The Resurrection and the Postmodern Dilemma,” Sewanee Theological Review 41.2, (1998), http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Resurrection_Postmodern.htm (accessed September 1, 2012).
22 Ibid.
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It is seen most clearly in the ethically incoherent lives lived by Western people. Its beat of relativism is heard most clearly in the contradictory hedonistic/altruistic, nihilistic/optimistic, spiritualistic/materialistic lifestyles of average people everywhere in the West. And therein lies the missionary challenge of the decade that comes after the 2000s.23
Consumerism
Consumerism is a real and present reality in the middle class suburban culture in
Australia. Note the following statistics on the spending habits of Australians: 56 percent of Australians believe they spend almost all their income on basic necessities.
Expenditure on imported consumer goods rose 60 percent between 2000 and 2004.
Australians spend about $10.5 billion on goods we do not use: wasted food and drink; appliances; exercise equipment memberships (in 2004, Australians spent about $500 million on gym memberships that were never or hardly used). Tweens (ages 8-14) control
$1.18 trillion per year. In 80 percent of all brand choices in family spending, tweens control the final decision. In 60 percent of all decisions about which car to buy, tweens control the final decision. Spending on mobile phones rose by 183 percent between 1999 and 2004.24
Consumerism is fuelled by, amongst other factors, the Australian’s love of television. The Australian Bureau of statistics states that, “TV watching/listening was found to be the activity which took up most people's leisure time. On a daily basis 87% of
23 Mark Sayers, Faith & Culture Blog (March 19, 2010),http://marksayers.wordpress.com/ 2010/03/19/what-ever-happened-to-postmodernism/ (accessed January 13, 2012).
24 Spending habits of Australians from Australian Bureau of Statistics 2004, http://abs.gov.au/ websitedbs/d3310114.nsf/4a256353001af3ed4b2562bb00121564/b6c9d5246460d275ca25705900820a02! OpenDocument (accessed January 11, 2012).
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Australians watched or listened to TV for an average of just under 3 hours (179 minutes), down slightly from the 1997 figure of 182 minutes. This means that in 2006, Australians aged 15 years and over spent a total of 42 million hours watching or listening to TV each day.”25 Psychology professor Carmen Lawrence, drawing on research from Tim Kasser notes the link between strong materialistic values and watching TV,
Using a variety of instruments, his research has shown that those with strong materialistic values and desires report more symptoms of anxiety, report less vitality and feelings of self-actualization, are at greater risk of depression, are more narcissistic and experience more bodily discomfort (aches and pains) than those who are less materialistic. They watch more TV, take more alcohol and drugs and have more impoverished personal relationships.26
In the absence of a competing story, viewers’ perception of reality begins to closely
“mirror” that of television content: “As television viewing increases, an individual's consumption perceptions more closely reflect the ‘reality’ of the television world … contemporary television portrays and therefore reinforces the belief that material goods and opulence are a good thing.”27
Another factor influencing the high level of consumerism in middle class
Australian culture is marketing and branding. Legitimate emotional and social needs to belong, to have friends, to achieve, to experience happiness and pleasure, to be safe, are used by corporations through marketing to link these emotions with their product: “One
25 Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Arts and Culture in Australia: A Statistical Overview, 2011,” http://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/[email protected]/0/32049C1F6913E595CA2 57968000 CB4 B2?Open document (accessed December 3, 2012).
26 Carmen Lawrence, “What rising inequality and materialism does to us,” http://www.shaping tomorrowsworld.org/lawrenceInequality.html (accessed December 3, 2012).
27 Cathy Bakewell and Vincent Wayne Mitchell, “Generation Y female consumer decision- making styles,” International Journal of Retail and Distribution Management, 31 n. 2 (2003), 95-106.
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of the most powerful tools in the advertisers’ armory is the capacity to link margarine, soft drinks, jeans and cars with the kind of emotions most people like to feel.”28
The Discipleship / Missional Challenge
The above influences are no less apparent in the Australian suburban culture within which Heathmont Baptist exists. This provides a context of significant challenge to effectively bear witness as salt and light in the following of Jesus. Under the influence of the norms and values of the wider society, the biblical notion of discipleship is threatened. Influences mentioned above of postmodern relativism and consumerism seep into the notion of what Christian faith is, and the result is deconstruction of the notion of
Christianity and discipleship presented in the New Testament. Consumerism encourages individualism through people choosing what is attractive and desirable and what meets individual needs.
This gives rise to a privatized, need-oriented expression of faith and discipleship that stands in contrast to the communal story that is biblical Christianity. Consumerism
“encourages people to view all their relationships (including that with the church) as a series of self-interested exchanges.”29 There is a clash of economies. “The exchange mentality locates the church within an economy of need and lack, whereas the economy
30 of salvation in Christ is one of abundance that frees us for service to our neighbor.” The
28 Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss, Affluenza: When Too Much is Never Enough (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005), 41.
29 Philip D. Kenneson and James L. Street, Selling Out the Church: The Dangers of Church Marketing (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1997), 57-58.
30 Ibid., 58. 22
result of consumerism is reflected in this kind of thought: “If in my everyday life, I am used to buying what I want, without thinking of others, why should I change that attitude when it comes to faith?”31 Sayers contends that one of the most alluring religious appeals of consumerism is it offers us a new immediacy; a living alternative to what Heaven has always stood for in the Judeo-Christian tradition – the fulfillment of all our longings.32
The prevalent influence of consumerism has dissipated the understanding of discipleship. Says Hirsch, “I think it is fair to say that in the Western church, we have by and large lost the art of disciple-making … we cannot consume our way into discipleship; and yet consumerism has become the driving ideology of the church’s ministry.”33 The
Church, the people of God are left competing, and easily become little more than a vendor of religious goods and services. Church services are reflective of this as the majority of attendees are passive consumers, recipients of the religious goods and services being delivered by professionals in a slick presentation and service.
That Christianity reflects the characteristics and conditions of the wider culture on the Christian “is not good news for missional Christianity, for if Christianity just mirrors the culture, what is the point of the mission?”34 Mark Greene of the Centre for
Contemporary Christianity asks, “My question is rather this: Is the Church herself
31 Dave Fagg, “Consumerism, faith and young people,” Revolve Youth for Christ Australia 12 (April 2006), 9.
32 Quoted in Alan Hirsch and Debra Hirsch, Untamed: Reactivating a Missional Form of Discipleship (Grand Rapids, Baker, 2010), 119.
33 Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church (Grand Rapids MI: Brazos Press, 2006), 45,103-104.
34 Ibid., 110.
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privatizing the Gospel? Is it the Church that is actually saying faith is a private, inner, pietistic, reflective thing that should have no impact on the broader life and society?”35
Greene calls for the crossing of the sacred-secular divide by ordinary Christians bringing their faith to bear in their public arenas - work, neighborhood, school, and university and for the Church to counter a pietistic emphasis that elevates church work and ministry above public engagement.
The challenge of transitioning Heathmont Baptist Church to being missional, and disciple-making, is that of assisting the Christ-followers of the Church to identify where prevailing culture has shaped Christianity in a way other than New Testament biblical
Christianity. This also involves the redefining of what true discipleship is. This is imperative for the realization of effective missional engagement in the age we live in.
35 Mark Greene, from Catherwood Lecture in Public Theology delivered by Mark Greene on 18 October 2001 at Union Theological College, Belfast, http://www.google .com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q= &esrc=s&source=web&cd=9&ved=0CFMQFjAI&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.contemporarychristianity.n et%2Fresources%2Fpdfs%2FPatmos05.pdf&ei=nGIUNSCGo2fiAfRpYGoBQ&usg=AFQjCNHlgM9Rtnh XtRrOicU7TFAuO_eZSw (accessed October 24, 2012). 24
CHAPTER 2
DESCRIPTION OF HEATHMONT BAPTIST CHURCH: PAST AND PRESENT
Heathmont Baptist Church was started from a vision for mission. The church grew and developed around sprawling population growth and suburban housing development and formed numerous ministries as an expression of congregational life and mission. This chapter describes the journey of the church from its inception to present day, from its growth to its plateau. It describes the formation of the church’s purpose to engage in disciple-making shaped by mission, and changes implemented to facilitate this.
Lastly, the chapter introduces the challenges that exist to arrest the drift from New
Testament mission shaped discipleship to a consumerist, “me centered” form of church expression.
The Birth and Development of Heathmont Baptist Church
Heathmont Baptist Church’s beginnings start on the evening of July 15, 1954, when a small band of people met to consider forming a Baptist church in the outer- eastern suburb of Melbourne called Heathmont. One month later the first meeting as a fellowship was held with retired Pastor J.E. Newnham who was known for his door-to-
25 door visits to share the Gospel.1 The first service began in a local community hall at
7:00pm on September 12 in that same year. On February 5, 1955, children’s Sunday school began which within eight weeks “had increased to 36 scholars.” Within two years the Sunday school and youth activities “were bursting at the seams.” In 1955 the church purchased its first land. On June 21, 1958 the church officially opened its first owned premises on that land.2
The first full-time pastor was appointed September 20, 1961. By mid-1969 the church relocated to larger premises having purchased land on what is the current site of
Cuthbert Street, Heathmont. The church had three hundred people attend the opening service. The 1970s witnessed a lot of change and growth including the opening of a pre- school on the premises, and the development of Boys Brigade. Of interest to the subject that is the focus of this project, in December 1973 the church leadership (then called a
Diaconate) received a letter from the Evangelism Committee expressing concern about the church programs, citing the following points after examination of the previous eleven years.
In examining church life over the last 11 years the following points were made: The total baptisms show only a slight increase in the last four years. Some recently baptized were no longer attending. On figure quoted at the meeting the church was only reaching our church homes with conversion, baptism and church membership. The question was asked: “Would it not be better to use some of the hours in the Sunday school each week reaching parents and thereby reaching the whole family?”3
1 As noted in a published history of the Heathmont Baptist Church by Rod Fraser, Ventures in Faith: Heathmont Baptist Church - The First Fifty Years (Heathmont Victoria: Heathmont Baptist Church, 2008), 8.
2 Ibid., 10.
3 Ibid., 45. 26
It appears the inertia relating to mission and evangelism has been a systemic pattern at
Heathmont Baptist Church with growth primarily coming from transfer, that is,
Christians from other churches joining.
The 1980s saw the addition of new pastors, the commencement of the first
Playgroup, which is now a vital aspect of the church’s mission, and the development of musical productions. The 1990s was an active decade in the life of the church, with the planting of a new church, the building of a larger worship center/auditorium on the same site, the formation of an inter-church help organization to distribute goods and clothes to needy people and the beginning of a counseling center. At the opening of the new worship center in October 1992 about 480 people overflowed the new “sanctuary” for the dedication service.4 The church plant to an area nearby that did not have the presence of a
Baptist church was a significant step for the body at Heathmont Baptist Church. Not only was there a significant financial contribution to the purchasing of land for the church plant, but also the then senior pastor of the Heathmont Baptist Church was released to lead the new work along with twenty-two members of the church. More members joined them over the next few years.
The first decade of the 2000s began with the adoption of a new leadership structure involving Church Council (four elected members, two pastors and the administrator,) Pastoral Elders (to support pastoral team, 5-6 elected elders,) Ministry
Area Leaders (Children and Families, Service, Fellowship, Outreach,) and
4 Ibid., 63. Whilst deemed ideal for its day with worship style centered on hymns or chorus singing, the structure of the new building extension has proved to be an obstacle in the current day as it struggles to effectively serve both the contemporary style of worship in services and the facilitation of equipping for mission. 27
Administration Team Leaders (Finance, Property, Stewardship).5 The church’s fifth senior pastor, John Smith (my predecessor) began his ministry in February 2000. The following year the church adopted a “focused ministry program” with the following vision statement, “A loving community: Christ centered, praying and unified, where God is worshipped and served. An equipping hub, empowering God’s people for evangelism and service.”6
John Smith concluded his ministry February 2008, and his ministry is remembered for his emphasis on prayer and his preaching on the emphasis on the importance of relationship with Christ as the basis for Christian discipleship.
Unfortunately, under some pressure due to conflicts within the church regarding ministry programs and directions, in 2007, Smith resigned his position after a period of personal leave. This was followed by an interim ministry of just over twelve months by David
McGrouther as interim senior pastor. During this period the church, at a church members meeting on April 14, 2008, adopted a mission statement: “To be about the Father’s business” and a set of Values: “Christ-centered, Biblical, Prayerful, Authentic,
Empowering, Life-Giving, Loving, Tolerant, Caring, And Compassionate.”
The period between Smith’s personal leave and departure, and the end of
McGrouther’s interim ministry unfortunately saw the church experience some decline.
Several factors account for this. A decision during Smith’s pastorate to have one morning service instead of two to develop a closer sense of family within the church community
5 Fraser, Ventures in Faith, 69.
6 Ibid., 72. 28 led to people leaving for other churches in the area. Some left the church in sympathy with the senior pastor following the senior pastor’s departure. Others left during the interim senior pastor’s ministry either in reaction to his leadership and/or preaching style, or in response to a perceived negative and discouraging climate in the church. A number of young families and youth departed during this period, increasing the sense of concern amongst some in the leadership that the church was in danger of serious decline. At the beginning of 2009 the number of teenagers had dropped to just over a dozen, with children numbering about thirty.
The Refocus of the Church for a Greater Direction Towards Mission
A significant consultation was undertaken as the church prepared for the search for a new senior pastor. This consultation was led by Martin Boutros who was at the time serving with the Baptist Union of Victoria and moving towards the finalization of a
Doctor of Ministry through Fuller Theological Seminary around the subject of the missional challenge for the Christian church. This consultation purposed to bring the attention and focus of the Heathmont Baptist Church congregation to the need for a heightened missional direction when considering the engagement of the next senior pastor. In the Heathmont Baptist Church Profile Report that was produced for the search process, the influence of this consultation was clearly evident, particularly the following:
The Future – Our Aspirations Both the suburb and the church are coming to the end of an era, as the 1970s generation of families see their offspring grow up, leave home and either downsize or sell their home to new families moving in. The demographics of the surrounding area are changing (e.g. “Ringwood Transit City”) and with those changes come all sorts of possibilities for future mission and shape.
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The church community are eager to see HBC embrace a fresh vision for mission into its local community. The following ‘dreams’ section lists the ideas and suggestions that are enthusiastically volunteered. Many members have been and continue to serve with great energy and commitment. There is a desire to see a relevant witness to those in the surrounding area. This is often expressed in terms of children’s and school’s ministry; but also with mindfulness that there is also an aging demographic who need to be engaged by the church community for both witness and care.
The Call of the Senior Pastor to a Redeveloped Position Description Prioritizing the Church’s Direction Towards Mission
An outcome of the consultation and decision by the Church Council was the drafting of a position description for the senior pastor that was a shift from the previous senior pastor’s role priorities towards one that was clearly shaped for a discipleship-in- mission direction. The Aspirations included the desire for a senior pastor who was
“entrepreneurial.” Five key result areas were listed in the new senior pastor position description: missional engagement, congregational spirituality, directing of church ministry, leadership support, and personal development and spiritual growth. Notably, missional engagement was listed as the first key result area, and clearly reflected the direction for Heathmont Baptist Church,
KEY RESULT AREA # 1 MISSIONAL ENGAGEMENT The mission of God is to be the priority of the local church. Heathmont Baptist Church aspires to be a thriving missional community engaging its context and world with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. That means the senior pastor is one who can lead the congregation into missional engagement.
A further shift for the church was the focus on the new senior pastor to provide strategic leadership and develop leaders and the mobilization of the priesthood of all believers to effect spiritual growth and missional engagement.
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KEY RESULT AREA # 3 DIRECTING OF CHURCH MINISTRY To oversee and monitor the implementation of a strategic plan – developed in conjunction with the Church Council – that will enable the church to effectively fulfill its mission. This will mean a pastor who is able to plan, organize, direct and manage a team; and to evaluate its progress. KEY RESULT AREA # 4 LEADERSHIP SUPPORT For all the members to use their gifts as the ‘priesthood, good leadership is needed. A confident team-building pastoral team and congregational leadership teams that will effectively empower supervise and delegate to their constituents. The pastor will need to identify, develop and support leadership – both current and potential.
When delivered to me for consideration by the search committee in October 2008, this position description drew my attention as I discerned a fit between the aspirations of the church and my own sense of leading to be a cultural architect of a congregation’s shift to be a Kingdom-building, missional community of faith. In the search process I asked the search committee the question “Is the direction for mission which involves change, as indicated in the Profile Report and the Position Description, truly reflective of the whole congregation’s aspirations?” The answer provided by Chair of the search committee who also served as the Chair of the church’s leadership body, the Church Council, was that the documents were not reflective of where the whole church was.7 He indicated it was brought together in a fairly rapid process at an evening facilitated by Boutros, and that the church was more culturally conservative than the documents present. However, it was affirmed that the numerous positive opportunities that were indicated in the document did indeed exist.
The search committee was strongly of the belief that the direction stated in the position description was critical for the church’s future. This led to my request to meet
7 From notes by Steve Roggero during Interview process with Heathmont Baptist Church search committee. 31 with the Church Council so I could ascertain if the leadership of the church was united in their conviction that the Lord was leading the church this direction, as the change process would entail inevitable stressors, discomfort and even conflict. Max De Pree notes the critical importance of leaders being discerning, “Leaders are accountable for the continuous renewal of the organization. Renewal results directly when a leader understands and communicates opportunities, constraints and reality.”8 An ensuing rigorous conversation with the Church Council caused me to reflect on whether there was the total ownership across the leadership to embrace the change and adaptation that was necessary for the church to fulfill their own stated outcomes. A combination of believing that God was leading me in this direction and that the majority of the leadership had indicated a willingness to embrace the journey of change led to my acceptance of the invitation to put my name forward to the members. The church then voted in my appointment at a properly constituted meeting on Sunday October 22, 2008, to begin
Sunday February 15, 2009.
The Current Demographical Make-Up of Heathmont Baptist Church
As a sign of the increased mobility within the surrounding culture, the church has experienced an ever-widening spread in the number of different home localities church adherents hail from. A few decades ago the vast majority of church attendees lived in the immediate Heathmont location. Presently, church attendees come from thirty-two different suburbs in the outer-eastern region of Melbourne. The age breakdown can be seen in the following figures drawn from the church’s database, 0 to 12 years–60 persons,
8 Max De Pree, Leadership is Jazz (New York: Dell Publishing 1992), 31. 32
13 to 18 years–60 persons, 19 to 25 years–80 persons, 26 to 39 years–81persons, 40 to 59 years–75 persons, 60+ years–83 persons. These figures refer to those who are active attendees at the church on the database and do not include attendees who are relatively new, or being reached out to, and are not on the database.
Current Ministry Description
Heathmont Baptist Church currently has twenty-six specific ministries led by volunteer leaders or staff.9 Each ministry has volunteers serving on the leadership team.
Amongst these ministries, the Playgroups ministry has six separate playgroups in active operation over five different days, and the Life groups (small groups) has multiple groups meeting over various nights and days as described below. The church’s direction as discussed in this project has influenced a move towards all ministries having a posture towards mission. In the last two years some of our larger ministries amongst the adult sector such as Men’s (Impact) and Women’s (Her Time) have transitioned their ministry focus to be not just about fellowship and encouragement. The emphasis has been on adapting events so that it facilitates members to connect with their network of friends beyond the faith. The youth have generally already had this orientation and focus.
Ministries that are specifically grounded in mission are the Playgroups, Creative
Moments (Women’s craft) and Restore, a ministry to provide practical help to disadvantaged people, for instance, house maintenance for a family without income to maintain essential dwelling needs. The church recently saw the closure of a kindergarten that was a ministry of the church but operated as its own incorporated business. The
9 Refer to Appendix A for a list of these ministries. 33 closure was due to lack of financial liquidity forced by insufficient registrations. This ministry started with a mission vision; however it became a program of presence without real ownership from the church for missional engagement. The ministry leadership considered whether there should be a rescue effort; however the kindergarten was at the time of insolvency under a ministry review in relation to its viability and effectiveness for mission. It was determined that there was a greater synergy to be missional through focusing on the multiple playgroups that were under the jurisdiction of the church, especially as the playgroups did not carry restrictive government regulations that are over kindergartens. Since the closure some twelve months ago, the Playgroups ministry has expanded with a musical playgroup called Mainly Music having started at the beginning of the year and two new playgroups due to open at the beginning of 2013.
Description of Small Groups (Life groups) - Historically and the Present
Increased focus and emphasis on small groups at Heathmont Baptist Church occurred following the appointment of Smith in 2000. This culminated in the forming of the ministry staff position of Pastor for Small Groups in 2007. In 2008, the name for small groups was changed to Connect groups and a document outlining the philosophy, purpose and goals for the Connect groups was produced and distributed to church members.
Connect Groups at Heathmont Baptist Church (2008) At Heathmont Baptist Church we believe that relationships are important. That’s why our Connect Groups are an essential part of our community life. ‘Church’ is both the large community and the small group community – celebration (worship services) and connect groups where we mutually support and encourage one another to do what God has called us to do.
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A great way to develop meaningful relationships with other people is by joining one of our connect groups.10
The goals set for the Connect Groups were, “To connect with God, to connect with each other, to connect with the community and the world around us.” The Connect Group was seen as the primary ‘building block’ of the church – the basic Christian community. It aimed at there being between three to twelve people and to meet regularly outside the church building preferably for the purpose of discipleship and evangelism with the goal of multiplication of members. The celebration happens when each small group comes together regularly with all the other groups into a celebration, which takes place as
Sunday services. The stated purpose was:
A Connect Group is a Disciple Making Group It is a place where we can grow together to become fervent followers of Jesus Christ through the process of discipling teaching and mentoring A Connect Group is a Care Group It is a place where we can gather together to care for one another through friendship, encouragement and practical expressions of love and kindness. A Connect Group is a Ministry Group It is a place where we can develop and use our God given gifts and abilities to help others. A Connect Group is an Outreach Group It is a place where we can help one another to reach our friends, neighbors and relatives in order for them to experience the life that is in Jesus Christ.11
The 2008 purposes, goals and description of the Connect Groups at Heathmont
Baptist Church reflect the common description that churches in the evangelical world in
Australia have used to frame small groups ministry. As Australian small group specialist
John Mallison puts it, “It is well to keep before a Christian group its basic purposes.
10 Wendy Henry, “Connect Groups at Heathmont Baptist Church” document, Heathmont Baptist Church, August 2008.
11 Ibid.
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These can be helpful objective criteria against which its shared life can be measured …
To worship and obey Christ … To bring people to a living faith in Christ … To foster fellowship … To minister to each other … To prepare each other for mission in the world.”12 The deficiency in relation to the effective function of Connect groups at
Heathmont Baptist Church lies in the inadequate grounding and application of what being a “disciple making” group and being an “outreach” group really means in the world we are living in. The need is for a deeper theological, ecclesiological and missiological reflection of discipleship and mission. This involves grappling with the question of why small groups are defined as Christ following communities that reach others in Christ, yet struggle to see this actually happen. This is a subject discussed in Chapters 4 and 5.
The current status of the small group ministry is that a new pastor is overseeing this ministry area. Rob Waddell is serving as the connect and care pastor overseeing welcome, integration, pastoral care and small groups and is working closely with myself as senior pastor on the missional small groups strategy discussed in Chapters 6 and 7.
Having transitioned from being chairperson of Church Council, Rob is committed to the direction of the church to become engaged as disciples in mission. Late in the year of
2011, it was decided to change the name of the Connect groups to “Life groups.” This was a measure to represent and symbolize the shift in direction from being small groups that are inwardly focused bible study and fellowship groups to groups that focus on the whole life purpose of living as disciples of Jesus in the everyday world, thereby mission flows from discipleship. Currently there are approximately 139 adults in thirteen Life
12 John Mallison, The Small Group Leader: A manual to develop vital small groups (Adelaide; Openbook Publishers, 1996), 7-11. 36 groups, thirty-four young adults in four Life groups, fifty teenagers in eight Youth Life groups. There is challenge to see more adults become part of Life groups in the life of the church.
Mission Through Vision and Values
A change of position description, appointment of the senior pastor and the willingness to change governance structure to facilitate mission, all committed to and actioned by the Church Council set up the foundation for Heathmont Baptist Church to be culturally repositioned towards a more missional posture. Upon my arrival in February
2009, there were calls by influential members for me to declare a new vision for the church and to spell out strategic steps we would take. However, I explained to them that I did not want to pursue a technical course where the leader has plans and strategies that the congregation will affirm and follow. Rather I was pursuing a path of cultivating an ethos and culture that would have the congregation then acknowledge the direction of
God towards Mission. As Alan Roxburgh describes in The Missional Leader, “cultivation describes the leader as the one who works the soil of the congregation so as to invite and constitute the environment for the people of God to discern what the spirit is doing in, with and among them as a community.”13 To cultivate the environment for a response to discipleship-in-mission, the strategy pursued was to facilitate a process with the congregation for setting Mission, Vision and Values statements that reflected Kingdom of
God priorities. This was completed through facilitated forums amongst members of
13Alan J Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader: Equipping Your Church to Reach a Changing World (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2006), 28. 37 congregation and leadership community, through preaching and teaching emphasis on the priorities and values of the Kingdom of God and the response of mission.
An appreciative inquiry process was conducted in 2009 with the wider church leadership community (Council, Pastors, Volunteers leaders) numbering more than forty people and followed by a congregational forum. Mark Lau Branson explains,
“Appreciative inquiry assumes that all organizations have significant life forces, and these forces are available in stories and imaginations.”14 The purpose was to diagnose from the congregation the life stories that could then be tracked into a shared imagination about the future. At these meetings three questions were asked:
Question 1. What are 2 or 3 things that you count as major highlights, high points in the life of the church since the time you have been here?
Question 2. What are the essential, central characteristics or ways of life that make our church unique?
Question 3. What dreams, longings do you have for the future of our church? Name 2 or 3 and describe what the church would look like if these came true?
The results of this enquiry process affirmed that there was an implicit and explicit desire from the congregation for the church to be an outreaching, community engaging, mission orientated church. It also affirmed at least in theory of general ownership of vision and the desire for the church to move towards being more missional.
The forming of the values statement process followed. This began with a sixteen week preaching series on Kingdom of God “values” from October 11, 2009 through to the end of March 2010, along with discussion and interaction at forums. The result of this
14 Mark Lau Branson, Memories, Hopes and Conversations: Appreciative Inquiry and Congregational Change (Herdon, Virginia: Alban Institute, 2004), 23.
38 initial cultivation process was the formal adoption by the church of mission focused mission, vision and values statements. The mission statement: “Announcing the Kingdom of God, Seeing Lives Transformed,” the vision statement: “A Missional, Caring
Community, Making Disciples and Building the Kingdom of God in Eastern Melbourne and Beyond,” and the values statement: “God centered, Growth oriented, Loving community, Empowered ministry, Missions focused, Future looking.”15
A Ministry Leadership Philosophy for Church Ministry
In the process of working towards forming a vision strategy based on the mission, vision and values, the ministry staff team worked collaboratively to develop a philosophy of ministry statement. The content of this statement would be used as a grid to both define and assess whether existing ministries or new ministries are strategic to the direction. In “Simply Missional” Ed Stetzer and Eric Geiger comment,
Churches with a simple process seek to lead people to be doers of the word, not just hearers (James 1:22). Discipleship to these churches is not information, but transformation. And a true disciple is someone who seeks to transform the community around him. Such churches streamline their programming to create space in the lives of their people to live as a disciple/missionary in their community.16
To aid this journey, a ministry philosophy statement was developed and agreed upon by the staff and endorsed by the Church Council. It is,
15 Refer to Appendix B for full Mission, and Vision statements and descriptions.
16 Ed Stetzer and Eric Geiger. “Simply Missional” http://ebookbrowse.com/simply-missional- stetzer-and-geiger-pdf-d249542519 (accessed 9 October, 2012), 3.
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Ministry and Mission at Heathmont Baptist Church 1. How we do Mission: Empowering & releasing people to use their gifts and potential to be missionaries in their walk of life. 2. How we do Discipleship: Building trust-filled relationships that speak the truth of Jesus into people’s lives.
Governance Change for Mission and Leadership
In the call process leading up to my appointment as senior pastor at HBC, it was agreed that the church needed restructuring to facilitate a response to mission, and to address the situation of the apparent dearth of leaders in the life of the church. After my arrival and survey of the structures and “mapping the political terrain,” it became evident that HBC was encumbered with a governance structure that lacked clarity and cohesion and which created layers of committees and management oriented activity.17 The result was that many of the stakeholders were tired and unmotivated. Tom Bandy says, “The organizations of the established church today … originally designed to produce mission results, they have gradually become so complicated and cumbersome as to only produce reports, maintain salaries, and preserve properties.”18 Though speaking about American congregations, Paul Borden describes well the situation at Heathmont Baptist Church,
Most congregations in the United States are designed to be small, remain small, and function ineffectively in the twenty-first century. These structures, from their inception until now, reflect the cultures in which they were created. Unlike in the Scriptures, authority is divided from responsibility to act. There is little if any
17 Lee G Bolman and Terrence E. Deal, Reframing Organizations, 3rd Ed. (San Francisco: Jossey- Bass, 2003), 207.
18 Tom Bandy in the forward to Winning on Purpose, by John Kaiser (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2006). 40
accountability for results, and the little that does exist is not applied with consistency throughout the system.19
Borden advocates a more comprehensive, consistent, holistic process for a governing group. In this system, the board or eldership appropriately oversees the church’s fulfillment of mission while empowering the minister and/or ministry staff to lead and manage the details of ministry. The model often adopted is some form of Policy
Governance.
The structure at Heathmont Baptist Church promoted maintenance focus rather than mobilizing members into mission oriented activity. This was reflected in the role and function of the Church Council in terms of its identity structurally and the job description for Church Council. This impacted on the role of the senior pastor and the pastoral staff, because although the espoused theory was that the senior pastor was called to “lead” the church along with the help and assistance of associate pastoral staff, the reality was that
Church Council was acting as leaders managing the ministry and therefore not putting in adequate time and focus on being a spiritual (praying, discerning God’s mind,) strategic and “getting on the balcony” governing body which fuels a mission oriented culture.
Ronald Heifetz and Donald Laurie expand on this,
Leaders have to be able to view patterns as if they were on a balcony. It does them no good to be swept up in the field of action. Leaders have to see a context for change or create one…Leaders must be able to identify struggles over values and power, recognize patterns of work avoidance, and watch for the many other functional and dysfunctional reactions to change. Without the capacity to move back and forth between the field of action and the balcony, to reflect day to day, moment to moment, on the many ways in which an organization’s habits can sabotage adaptive work a leader easily and unwittingly becomes a prison of the
19 Paul Borden, Direct Hit: Aiming Real Leaders at the Mission Field (Nashville: Abingdon, 2006), 21. 41
system. The dynamics of adaptive change are far too complex to keep track of, let alone influence, if leaders stay only on the field of play.20
The Church Council and in particular the Chairperson Rob Waddell was committed to review its own operations. It thereby set an agenda for reviewing and restructuring governance operations. This was clearly a structural frame issue which necessitated some careful design which is at the heart of organizational structure, that is,
“how to allocate work and how to coordinate roles once responsibility is parceled out.”21
The Church Council constitutionally is the governing body empowered by the church members to govern the management of the church and is accountable to the members through quarterly meetings. However, after a Council meeting where I asked a number of questions, it was apparent that there was an espoused theory versus theory in use contradiction operating. Argyris explains this as: “Put simply, people act inconsistently; unaware of the contradiction between their espoused theory and their theory in use, between the way they think they are acting and the way they really act.”22
The Church Council was regarded by the church members as the leadership oversight of the church. However, the Council did not operate with a governance oversight “theory in use,” particularly in the matter of assuming the spiritual authority that is associated with being the appointed leadership body of the church. This resulted in a “double loop”
20 Ronald A. Heifetz and Donald L. Laurie, “The Work of Leadership,” Harvard Business Review (January-February 1997), 125, 126.
21 Bolman and Deal, Reframing Organizations, 49.
22 Chris Argyris, “Teaching Smart people how to learn,” Harvard Business Review (Boston, Massachusetts: 1991), 9.
42 learning process where learning could occur to change underlying values and assumptions.23
This inconsistency was acknowledged by the Council who subsequently agreed to redefine the structural function. Ely and Meyerson’s contribution of “3 phases of change project” was particularly useful in the design and persuading of governance change.24
They outline three phases that were used to effect cultural and systemic change: (1)
Critique, (2) Narrative revision, and (3) Experimentation. The critique phase is the situation discussed above where Council could consider the questions of the effectiveness of the church structure, of whether Council is being and doing what is of the most strategic of leadership value and why there is a lack of clarity and impetus in the organization and ministry of the church. The narrative revision was useful in considering how the church had been operating and drawing out what was helpful and not helpful in the church’s narrative on leadership and structure. The experimentation phase is valuable in that intervention can occur in another guise: “Calling intervention experiments is important because people are less resistant to the notion of an experiment which they can
23 Argyris proposes a double loop learning theory which pertains to learning to change underlying values and assumptions. The focus of the theory is on solving problems that are complex and ill-structured and which change as problem-solving advances. This perspective examines reality from the point of view of human beings as actors. Changes in values, behavior, leadership, and helping others, are all part of, and informed by, the actors' theory of action. An important aspect of the theory is the distinction between an individual's espoused theory and their "theory-in-use" (what they actually do); bringing these two into congruence is a primary concern of double loop learning. Typically, interaction with others is necessary to identify the conflict. This was developed in Increasing Leadership Effectiveness (New York: Wiley, 1976).
24 Robin J. Ely and Debra E Meyerson, “Theories of Gender in Organizations: A new approach to organizational analysis and change,” in Research in Organizational Behavior Volume 22, eds. Barry M. Straw and Robert I. Sutton (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 2000), 135-141.
43 think of as a temporary trial, rather than a necessarily permanent change.”25 The Church
Council employed the temporary trial of a new governance model for eighteen months prior to bringing forth recommendations to the church members for constitutional change.
The change called for a model primarily purposed to facilitate the empowerment and mobilization of members to be engaged in mission as disciples of Jesus. The model that was ultimately adopted at a church members meeting in May 2011 involved the following three aspects.
The Council Governs
The Council governs the church by stating and enforcing guiding principles that authorize the pastor and staff team to lead the church to fulfill its mission. To perform this function the Council is envisioned by the Pastor who has created a collaborative engagement in establishing a vision, guided by the Chairperson. But this does not mean that the Council becomes merely a yes or no accountability body. Chait, Ryan and Taylor have made an important contribution on the function and roles of boards. They argue that many boards operate mainly within the fiduciary, often producing boredom and fatigue and preventing the board from exercising an effective leadership function in the organization. Instead of being merely an accountability group, boards should be engaged with “sense making: acting and then thinking, making sense of past events to produce new meanings.”26 The board can exercise leadership in its governance by fulfilling a strategic and generative function (in addition to the necessary fiduciary). The strategic
25 Ibid., 139.
26 Richard Chait, William P. Ryan, and Barbara E. Taylor, Governance as Leadership: Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 1. 44 function which the authors name Type II governance “aims to construct, not merely certify, a consensus about what the organization’s strategy should be.”27 The generative function, which is called Type III, is where the board, along with the executive leadership, rigorously and robustly seeks to make sense of what is happening in the organization, the problems, opportunities and what the information and data coming before the board means. It is a thoughtful, “getting on the balcony” function that enables the Church Council to exercise leadership.
A Pastor That Leads
The pastor - equipped by the board with clear responsibility, authority, and accountability - leads the church by engaging the board and heading up the staff team.
Chait et al make an important point, “the CEO still stands as the leader of the organization and still provides leadership for the board. However, that leadership now engages and challenges the board, whereas CEOs may once have been inclined to marginalize or shield the board.”28
A Staff That Manages
The staff - empowered by the pastor within the governance of the board - runs the ministries of the church within their own responsibility, authority, and accountability.
Borden and John Kaiser’s adaptations on Carver’s work of Governance to apply to congregational governed churches has been instructive in Heathmont Baptist Church
27 Ibid., 69.
28 Chait, Ryan and Taylor, Governance as Leadership, 181. 45 adopting a new leadership and governance model.29 A guiding principal has been that this policy governance and biblical governance model places a value on empowerment, all towards the fulfilling of mission. The model functions in this manner: governance board supports and holds accountable the senior pastor. The senior pastor leads the church, directly supports and holds accountable the staff. The staff manages administration, and equips and guides the congregation. The congregation does ministry, and supports and holds accountable the governance board. Everything centers around the core values and mission of the church.
The Bible does not prescribe the specifics of what church governance should look like, however the role and functions of the senior pastor and ministry staff are consistent with Paul’s reference to equipping “evangelists” and “pastors and teachers” in Ephesians
4:11. What is required is,
A form of transforming leadership, grounded in a spirituality of servant leadership: taking risks on behalf of the congregation to help it better embody its mission as a sign and witness of God’s self-giving love. In short, the leaders of congregations carry out the tasks of practical theological interpretation to guide their community in participating in the priestly, royal, and prophetic office of Christ.30
The theological layer underpinning this model is that it is Jesus Christ is the ultimate
“owner” of the church. Leonard Sweet insists that this is the “most elemental biblical
29 See Paul Borden, Hit the Bullseye: How Denominations Can Aim the Congregation At the Mission Field (Nashville: Abingdon, 2003). John Kaiser, Winning on Purpose (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2006).
30 R.R. Osmer, Practical Theology: An Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008), 29.
46 attitude toward life: God is the owner. I am the ower.”31 From a governance perspective, while the Church Council and the senior pastor have accountability to the technical owners – the congregation – neither of these parties are the true owners of the church:
God is. Therefore as the church belongs to Jesus Christ, the church is for “outsiders first, and insiders second.”32 The Leadership governance structure was changed formally in the adoption of a revised constitution by vote of the members on May 2011 and currently reads as follows:
4. Governance 4.1 Under the guidance of God and the Scriptures, the Church will be governed according to congregational principles, with the Church Members Meeting being the final authority on all matters. 4.2 The Church recognizes the Church Council as its governing body and authorizes it to manage the affairs of the Church subject to this Constitution. 4.3 The Church Council must maintain open communication with members on the affairs of the Church. 4.4 The Church understands itself to be the Body of Christ and is accountable to Him. As a practical way to exercise ministry the Members (i.e. the Body) elect and empower Church Council, who in turn empowers the senior pastor, who in turn empowers the Pastoral Staff and Ministry Leaders to undertake ministry activities which includes equipping and empowering Members of the Body for ministry and service. (See Circle of Empowerment below.)33
Recruitment of Equipper Pastors with Leadership Gifting
Prior to my arrival at HBC in February 2009, I had been informed by the Church
Council that there would more than likely be transitions with two existing pastoral staff
31 Leonard Sweet, “Freely You Have Received, Freely Give,” http://www.leonardsweet.com/art icledetails.php?id=23 (accessed June 12, 2012).
32 Kaiser, Winning on Purpose, 26.
33 Heathmont Baptist Church Constitution 18 May 2011. See Appendix C for Circle of Empowerment figure.
47 likely to finish within a year and additionally the vacant youth pastor position needing to be filled. This time-frame changed rapidly as within two months of my arrival both the existing pastors submitted their resignations and a few months later I facilitated a review process that led to the children’s pastor acknowledging that she was in the wrong fit, had never felt a resonance in the role she was serving. She subsequently resigned.
A significant opportunity existed to design and culture-shape the future direction of the church through the recruiting of pastoral staff that “fit” the adaptive change direction. The Jim Collins concept of “First who … then what,” was brought to bear.
Collins describes that in researching the companies that moved from good to great, were those that “first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats – and then they figured out where to drive it.”34
At that time Heathmont Baptist Church pastoral staff were employed through the process of nomination by a search committee, who were nominated by the senior pastor and Church Council and affirmed at a church member’s meeting. The senior pastor chaired this committee which allowed me the opportunity to help shape the “culture” of who the right persons might be to “get on the bus.” To effect this, I led a review process at Church Council of the type of pastoral staff appointments that were needed for the church to move in new directions. It was subsequently agreed that the following three pastoral staff appointments would need to be “leaders of leaders,” rather than solo practitioners. The next appointments would need to be persons who understood a larger church model, where emphasis is on coaching, equipping and releasing others into
34 Jim Collins, Good to Great (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 41. 48 ministry. They would also be people that were committed to church as “sent ones in mission.” This by design created a framework within which the search committees would work to seek the right person to “get on the bus.” Revised position descriptions were agreed for each pastoral position and subsequently endorsed by the church membership.
Hence a guiding framework was formed that the search team could work within for discerning the right person for the position that would facilitate the mission direction.
The Challenge to Refocus Ministry Towards Disciple-Making Shaped by Mission
Numerous challenges are present currently. The impact of western society with the impact of consumerism, mobility and so on has been discussed in the previous chapter. There has been a dearth of baptisms of new believers. Only two adult baptisms in three years of adults who declared a new allegiance to Christ in a new found Christian faith. A lack of apparent urgency amongst many in the congregation about this reality is telling. This is flanked by another challenge: the inward focus of discipleship. The narrative in many conversations on a Sunday after church, or at their Life group is focused on personal needs or in social commentary such as the football results. Some who have attached themselves to church have done so as a haven for disappointment, hurt, or damage experienced elsewhere and the result when a few of such people get together is a small group functioning as a support group rather than as Christ’s body in mission.
At a positive level there is a collective response that the church ought to be about mission and there is a sense of shared desire that ministry programs ought to be oriented towards the greater community. However there appears to be a significant gap for church
49 members between the mental assent of this and actions that ought to be demonstrating this. There is the lack of understanding theologically and ecclesiologically of what mission is, which reflects David Bosch’s assessment that in the West “mission” and
“theology” is not incorporated as a unit in the church.35 There is an apparent dearth of evangelistic activity as focus can often be on the running of ministry programs that are perceived to be reaching out to the neighborhood, when in reality there is little fruit of authentic relationships developing that would enable the truth of Jesus to be shared.
35 David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 1991), 27-45.
50
PART TWO
BIBLICAL AND THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION
CHAPTER 3
REVIEW OF LITERATURE
This chapter explores how discipleship and mission are unreservedly central to the nature and function of the church, and thus sets the priority for “disciples-in-mission” based church ministry. A discussion of the impact of modernity and enculturation of western society values on the congregational leads to consideration of the transition to a discipleship-based missional frame of church ministry. Finally, the chapter will consider the changing role of Church leadership that is necessary to facilitate congregational engagement in discipleship-based mission, and how these inform the ministry of
Heathmont Baptist Church.
Discipleship-in-Mission: The Divine Conspiracy – Dallas Willard
Pertinent to this project, The Divine Conspiracy provides foundations and insights regarding discipleship, mission and the Church. This is particularly so in relation to the struggle the Church is facing under the grip of consumerism, individualism and superficiality. Willard observes that Jesus invites everyone to come and follow him in living the life of the Kingdom of God, that we would join God in a divine conspiracy to
52 advance the invisible Kingdom of God here on earth. The way we join the conspiracy is by choosing to be an apprentice to Jesus, who stands at the center of everything - having died on a cross “to undermine the structures of evil.”1 However, few choose to take his call to discipleship seriously. Willard attacks the erosion of truth and dilution of what the biblical Gospel really means, as Jesus intended the Kingdom message to be understood.
Willard corrects inadequate Gospel representations he calls “The Gospels of Sin
Management,” which he defines as theological stances taken by the left and right side of the theological spectrum “When we examine the broad spectrum of Christian proclamation and practice, we see that the only things made essential on the right wing of theology is forgiveness of the individuals’ sins. On the left it is the removal of social or structural evils.”2 Willard argues that making a theory of Atonement (on the right) or
Social Justice (on the left) the cornerstone of our understanding of life with God and eternal life is a weak and distorted picture of Jesus’ original message “neither group lays down a coherent framework of knowledge and practical direction adequate to personal transformation toward the abundance and obedience emphasized in the New Testament with a corresponding redemption of ordinary life.”3 Willard goes on to then unpack the
Beatitudes where he makes the case that they demonstrate the availability of the
Kingdom to all kinds of people especially those who are not considered significant by the kingdoms of this world. In this section, Willard expounds the teachings of Jesus about the
1 Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, 188.
2 Ibid., 41.
3 Ibid. 53 ways of a person living according to the Kingdom of the heavens, rather than giving a list of rules or a new law.
In the final sections, Willard argues the need for discipleship not merely converts and then details comprehensively what this looks like. He outlines two objectives of discipleship: developing a loving relationship with God, where we love Him and know
His love for us, and the transformation from natural patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that are out of alignment with the Kingdom, in order that in their place there would be behavior and attitudes that are of Him: the goodness of God, God's love to humanity through Jesus, and God's involvement in our personal life. Willard then discusses four of the most crucial spiritual disciplines: silence, solitude, study, and worship.
In particular, Willard’s attack on the “Gospel of sin management” is instructive in the context of Heathmont Baptist Church. As Heathmont Baptist Church has a more conservative theological background, it is the focus on personal salvation and the orientation on the message of eternal salvation that has been prevalent to the detriment of a now and not yet Kingdom theology. As Willard points out “Non discipleship is the elephant in the church … The fundamental negative reality among Christian believers now is their failure to be constantly learning how to live their lives in the Kingdom among us. And it is an accepted reality.”4 Scot McKnight develops this critique, “We evangelicals (as a whole) are not really ‘evangelical’ in the sense of the apostolic gospel, but instead we are soterians … we evangelicals (mistakenly) equate the word gospel with
4 Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, 301. 54 the word salvation … we have created a ‘salvation culture’ and mistakenly assumed it is a ‘gospel culture’.”5 This creates the problem of the “The Decided” rather than “The
Discipled,” a problem caused not by church programs or structures; it is an inherent problem with a soterian culture.6
A desire to reframe the theological understanding of discipleship and its implications for lifestyle transformation is met with resistance by many church members.
A beachhead of comfortability and consumer attachment pushes back calls for radical discipleship, for being a “decided” has far less demand associated with it than being discipled. As Willard points out, the call to discipleship means that we must turn the tide against consumer Christianity that takes care of our needs rather than teaching us to make disciples.7
The Divine Conspiracy is instructive for this project in regards to contributing some definition of what being a disciple actually means. Willard states that whatever it is we do, it should be done “as Jesus Himself would do it.”8 The question is not whether an individual is a disciple but what master they are following.9 A disciple must demonstrate that there is nothing more valuable than fellowship with Jesus and His Kingdom. They must center their lives upon the principles Willard espouses from the Sermon on the
Mount. Then along the way, discipleship will produce a desire to “share the new reality
5 Scot McKnight, The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 29.
6 Ibid., 30, 31.
7 Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, 303.
8 Ibid., 286.
9 Ibid., 272. 55 they have found with those around them.”10 For Willard, the lack of discipleship is the foundation for “much discussed moral failures, financial abuses, or the amazing general similarity between Christians and non-Christians.”11
A further important contribution from The Divine Conspiracy to the thinking and strategy involved with this Project is that Discipleship does not just happen - it is a matter of personal intention to become a disciple. It is also a matter of church intention to make disciples. Willard fails to adequately provide some technical assistance in how church leaders might apply his principles of discipleship intentionality; however this in my view is forgivable, as it appears the author’s main focus is to address the transformation of the believer from the interior life to the exterior, so as to express life as a true follower of
Jesus.
Transforming Discipleship - Greg Ogden
Sharing a similar conviction to Willard, Greg Ogden in Transforming
Discipleship believes that something needs to be and can be done about the problem the church faces in making disciples in the world we live in; a problem that is evident in the lack of disciples in the modern church. Ogden assesses the state of discipleship today in strong terms, citing a “discipleship malaise,” where there lies an emphasis and dependency on programs, and a tendency for many to “reduce the Christian life to the
10 Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, 299.
11 Ibid., 301.
56 eternal benefits we get from Jesus rather than living as students of Jesus.”12 Ogden’s point is pertinent to the challenge this Project seeks to address. Heathmont Baptist Church has been, like many churches around Australia, a church program driven church. Ed Stetzer and Eric Geiger aptly describe the situation:
Dell Computers has shattered the warehouse myth. Most companies love big warehouses. They feel safe with lots of inventory on large shelves in massive warehouses, always ready for that next order. In their minds, the well-stocked warehouse confirms the belief they will always be able to meet customer demands and customer expectations. Dell disagrees with the warehouse approach. In the technology business, the product literally rots in value on the shelves. Because Dell does not want their best resources on the shelves, they only keep two hours of inventory. Which means that if you order a PC on dell.com, the parts will not arrive to Dell until two hours before your PC is shipped to you. Dell wants their resources out there, on the street. Not in the warehouse, where the resources merely gather dust and produce no impact. So Dell has designed a very strategic process to move their resources to the street. Sadly many churches are betting their futures on the warehouse myth. Most churches build big warehouses and shelve a bunch of Christians (those rows look suspiciously like shelves). They design attractive programs to “retain” people in the sacred warehouse, keep precise records of how much inventory (people) is on the shelves, and brag about their warehouses being constantly open.13
To address the problem of having so few disciples in the modern church, Ogden in the next part of his book draws on the biblical examples of how Jesus and Paul discipled.
Jesus invested in few rather than many, and the men He discipled would then carry on
His work after He departed. Ogden points to stages in the discipling process Jesus employed: First, He was an example to them, then their teacher, then their coach, and lastly a delegator sending them to carry on his work. The life and mission of Jesus first
12 Greg Ogden, Transforming Discipleship: Making Disciples a Few at a Time (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003), 39, 46.
13 Stetzer and Geiger, “Simply Missional”, http://ebookbrowse.com/simply-missional -stetzer-and-geiger-pdf-d2\49542519 (accessed 9 October, 2012).
57 needed to be internalized in the lives of His disciples, and this could only be achieved through up close and personal relationship.14 Then, would follow the multiplication process, in which the disciples take what has been invested in them and carry on bringing the message of the Kingdom of God to others.
The strategy of Jesus is contrasted to the focus of churches today on preaching and programs. The investing in a few rather than the many is discipleship that is
“fundamentally a relational process,” whereas, “we rely on programs because we don’t want to pay the price of personal investment that discipleship requires.”15 There is a resonance here in regards to the experience of church life at Heathmont Baptist Church.
In the midst of an increasingly time-poor lifestyle (both perceived and actual,) and the impact of a dissonance in the postmodern era, it appears harder than ever to get traction from church members to commit the personal investment that discipleship and mission require as presented in this chapter and the next.
Ogden presents a methodology for the way people, in particular Christian leaders, can build disciples which draws on the pattern of Jesus investing in a few, rather than many. This is called the “Preparatory Empowerment Model.”16 Ogden uses the motif of the apostle Paul as a parent to his churches, to outline a “Spiritual Parenting” model of discipleship.17 Paul parents his churches from infancy to adulthood, transformation and maturity being the goals.
14 Ogden, Transforming Discipleship, 65.
15 Ibid., 67.
16 Ibid., 75ff.
17 Ibid. 58
In the final section “Multiplying Reproducing Discipleship Groups,” Ogden presents a strategy, which churches and their pastors and leaders can adopt. Groups of three are recommended as the ideal size and a commitment is called for to a discipleship relationship lasting from a year to eighteen months. Focus is placed on the importance of relationships, multiplication and the importance of transparent trust, God’s word, and mutual accountability. The end goal is that these groups at the end of the time will then multiply as members start new triplets.
The importance of relationships stressed by Ogden is vital to understanding discipleship and Christian community. Time and proximity is a critical component in the development of relationships, as is demonstrated by Jesus spending three years with His disciples and Paul’s relationship with people in the churches he planted. Accountability is also a very important consideration. Ogden gives only superficial treatment to the potential abuse of accountability and misuse of authority and could have expanded on this to a greater extent. However, the place of a loving accountability seems linked to the effectiveness of a discipling process.
This practice of accountability is linked to the practice of disciplines. Personal responsibility is required in developing one’s own spiritual formation process, which deliberately cooperates with the Spirit and does not wait for a bolt of lightning from above: “I must learn and accept the responsibility of moving with God in the transformation of my own personality.”18 Little can be accomplished without discipline.
18 Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus's Essential Teachings on Discipleship (New York: Harper One, 2006), 150.
59
Ogden’s book can be critiqued in regards to the lack of missional inter- connectedness with discipleship. The focus on discipleship relationships whilst it is for the end purpose of mission, that more disciples will multiplied, it nevertheless seems to be compartmentalized within the organism of church life and relationships. There is inadequate treatment of disciples as learning and growing within their accountable relationship as they journey in the midst of their everyday world. As we will observe in the next chapter, as seen in Luke 10, Jesus’ method of discipling involved interaction and engagement by Him and/or His disciples with those who were not yet followers. The mission was an intricate part of the relational experience and growth for the disciples.
Small Groups
At the core of the strategy addressed in Chapters 6 and 7 are the Life groups, which are the small groups of Heathmont Baptist Church. The contributions of Gareth
Icenogle and Scott Boren on small groups provide a platform for a biblical and theological legitimacy for the role of small groups in the task of transitioning a church towards a more effective engagement with discipleship and mission.
Biblical Foundations for Small Group Ministry - Gareth Icenogle
Icenogle begins his book by saying, “We may be entering a ‘golden age’ of small group life and action.”19 He says this because, “We appear to be at a catalytic junction in human history when the small group demand of the culture and the creation mandate for
19 Gareth Icenogle, Biblical Foundations for Small Group Ministry (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1994), 10. 60 humanity to flourish in small groups seem to be converging in all arenas of life.”20 This is a more optimistic view than I would hold when looking through the lens of the ever- increasing discontinuity that is evident in the lives of people in the cultural context of
Melbourne. The church members of Heathmont Baptist Church have in the last couple of years demonstrated a great inconsistency in their attendance to their Life groups, most often citing “busyness” as the reason for the absenteeism. I would suggest that the real need does exist in the prevailing culture for small group spiritual community and relational life, it is just that a gap has widened between this real need and people’s willingness and/or ability to respond to this need.21 This contextual reality however only makes more pertinent Icenogle’s notion that there is a creation mandate for humanity to flourish in small groups. It presents a clarion call to be drawn back to the God given foundations and purpose for why small groups exist at Heathmont Baptist Church, and to apply the appropriate challenge to the body to realize an energized and active participation in small groups for the glory of God.
A comprehensive biblical survey is taken by Icenogle as he delivers Old and New
Testament foundations. From the New Testament Icenogle examines the life of Jesus with His disciples and then the early church. On the foundation of his biblical basis,
Icenogle then provides ten biblical and theological foundations for small group ministry.
The basis for small groups begins right from the Creation narrative. Icenogle writes, “The small group is the base community in which men and women can meet God and one
20 Ibid.
21 From here on all reference to Heathmont Baptist Church small groups will be referred to as “Life groups.” 61 another to be, to plan, and to act for the careful nurturing of relationships with created things. This small group is not only a being group for the nurture of persons but an acting group for the benefit of creation.”22
Importantly the foundation for community right at the beginning embodies the two aspects of relational community and mission. Relational community has its basis and is informed by the existence of God as Trinity. Icenogle summarizes the profundity of this relationship between God as community and humanity as community with his first two summary points of the biblical and theological foundation for small groups.
From the beginning, God has existed as a community of Being. In human history God has revealed this community of Being as Father, Son and Spirit, an eternal small group, a Trinity of Being and relationship, around whom the greater community of eternal beings is gathered, both angelic and resurrected … From the beginning of human history, the eternal God in Community created humanity as community. Humanity reflects the eternal community of God as man and woman together with God. These three form the primeval small group of human history. The minimum group of two, together with the Community of God, is called to live in intimate, reciprocal, dialogical and growing relationship. Around this prototype small group of the first divine-human community, God has gathered the greater human community of history.23
Small groups are in their essence formed around the concept of relationships that begins with the nature and activity of God. Thomas Torrance speaks of the concept of the Trinity as the “dynamic three-way reciprocity” between Father, Son and Spirit. He calls this “the
22 Icenogle, Biblical Foundations for Small Group Ministry, 23.
23 Ibid., 371. 62 perichoretic24 coactivity of the Holy Trinity.”25 Stanley Grenz writes, “God’s triune nature means that God is social or relational - God is the ‘social Trinity.’ And for this reason, we can say that God is ‘community.’” Ted Bolsinger writes, “Essentially, what we … see is that because God is a Trinity, the essence of God is loving relationship, best understood as communion. Therefore, the essence of humanity, as God’s creation, is also relationship
… Truly understanding who God is, is absolutely necessary for understanding who we are and who we were meant to become.”26 Newbigin writes, “Interpersonal relatedness belongs to the very being of God. Therefore there can be no salvation for human beings except in relatedness.”27
Community demonstrated through the prototype of small group is also established in the biblical accounts of Jesus with His disciples and the early church.
The man Jesus, himself, is the divine act of intervention and restoration between God and humanity. Jesus surrounded himself with small groups of men and women who looked to him as the Lord and model of One who builds divine- human community. The small group who lives and walks with Jesus discovers how humanity can live with God and live with one another in shalom and Sabbath … the small groups of men and women who responded to, lived with and love the historical Jesus came together as a new community with the resurrected Christ.
24 The concept of perichoresis was birthed by Gregory of Nanzianzus and is sometimes pictured as a dance. Clark Pinnock writes that “the metaphor suggests moving around, making room, relating to one another without losing identity … At the heart of this ontology is the mutuality and reciprocity among the Persons … a circle of loving relationships.” Clark H. Pinnock, Flame of Love: A Theology of the Holy Spirit (Downer’s Grove: IVP, 1996), 31.
25 Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1996), 198.
26 Tod E. Bolsinger, It Takes a Church to Raise a Christian (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 23-24.
27 Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1995), 70. 63
They shared in his ongoing intimacy with Abba and learned the freedom of intimacy with one another.28
The small groups that are demonstrated in the New Testament inform this project with
Christological and ecclesiological perspectives. The small group in the current day
Church looks to Jesus as the founder and the model of leadership that cultivates community. The small group is not a just a community of human individuals who share the faith in Christ, it is community of the Spirit where, “The gathered men and women came to understand and experience the community of the Spirit, in whom the relationship of Jesus and Abba becomes the relationship of human community sharing with Jesus and
Abba.”29
An important application of viewing the ecclesia as an extension of the twelve is the place community must play in interpreting and understanding the Word of God. “We need to interpret biblical texts with a community hermeneutic rather than a privatistic hermeneutic.”30 Icenogle’s critique of the American culture rings true for the Australian one also, “Such a privatistic hermeneutic runs deep in American cultural blood, but we are coming more and more into a period where this bias will not carry the church.”31
The role and function of the Holy Spirit is a vital aspect of understanding the small group as a community of faith that relates to God but also to the community. Gibbs and Bolger comment that,
28 Icenogle, Biblical Foundations for Small Group Ministry, 372.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., 253.
31 Ibid. 64
The Holy Spirit continues the work of Jesus. Seeking to implement the kingdom of God on earth, the Holy Spirit motivates people to live like Jesus, to lean into the kingdom, to serve, and to forgive. Just as Jesus was, Christians are to be in their cultures everywhere and at every time. The Holy Spirit will lead those who are willing to live in the kingdom and to participate in God’s mission through the proclamation of the gospel until the return of Christ.32
The God who is Spirit is relational and therefore as Stanley Grenz points out,
“Throughout eternity the Triune God is a vital dynamic. This vitality, in turn, overflows to creation.”33
Missional Small Groups: Becoming a Community That Makes a Difference in the World - Scott Boren
How small groups can actually “overflow to creation,”34 and “to participate in
God’s mission through the proclamation of the gospel” is the crux of the matter regarding the missional challenge facing the Church today. 35 This is particularly so for the numerous churches in Australia like Heathmont Baptist Church who operate small groups as a major program for expressing church life and practice. In the midst of all the busyness of helping churches set up small groups, the beat of the drum has changed:
The original drumbeat called small groups that make a difference in the world has been overridden by a new one that unfortunately was identified by the same name–small groups. The original drumbeat had produced stories such as a group creating a place in a coffee shop where people could explore Christianity in conversational ways, and groups that adopted a local fire department and befriended the firemen in ways that eventually led to conversational ministry. But
32 Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger, Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), 59, 60.
33Stanley Grenz, Theology for the Community of God, (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), 54.
34 Ibid.
35 Gibbs and Bolger, Emerging Churches, 59, 60.
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when the beat of the drum changed, the stories focused instead on groups that were designed to enfold the Christians who filled the pew on Sundays. … There was less emphasis on groups doing out-of-the-box things to impact life in neighborhoods, engage people at the workplace, and empower people in the groups to be missionaries. Instead the focus moved to talk about which was the best curriculum, whether to worship in groups, and if it was realistic to expect people to meet more than once or twice a month. There was a subtle shift from what God was doing through the groups to various techniques to get churched people to join small groups.36
Boren is inspired by the notion of small groups not being the focus but to be “simply a mechanism for carrying the kingdom of God to this world.”37 Boren’s development of rhythms that small groups can develop and practice informs the strategy that is the focus of Chapters 6 and 7 of this project paper. In the goal to be disciples-in-mission the church, “Instead of doing groups for the sake of experiencing community, groups experience community for the sake of participating in God's redemption of creation …
Christianity requires community if it is going to be modeled correctly.”38 Therefore we must “learn to be relational in the way we interact with one another and in our neighborhoods.”39
To help us understand the distinctiveness between missional groups and the normal groups that are so predominant in our churches today, the author points out that small groups usually revolve around one of four stories - personal improvement, lifestyle adjustment, relational revision, and missional re-creation. Particularly relevant to the
36 Scott M. Boren, Missional Small Groups: Becoming a Community That Makes a Difference in the World (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010), 19, 20.
37 Boren, Missional Small Groups, 19.
38 Ibid., 23.
39 Ibid., 34. 66 challenge at Heathmont Baptist Church are the first two. The personal improvement group is where the small group meeting revolves around Christians meeting one another on reasonably regular basis where the opportunity is provided for people to improve the normal rhythms of their lives.
We get together because life is tough in this world and we need a few friends. It is not always convenient for us to meet every week, but we do meet when we can. Usually we meet in short six- or seven-week periods or we meet a couple times a month. We get together, talk a bit about God or study the Bible, and share what is going on at work and in our family. I am not sure that we are close, but it is good to have a place where we can share a little about what is going on in our lives. Being in my small group has improved my life.40
The result is a fledgling sense of community and a perception that the quality of our lives improving.
The Lifestyle adjustment groups are where people make a commitment to a formal gathering:
This group has become a priority to us. We have adjusted our schedules to meet together at least every other week, but usually we meet weekly. In our meetings, we either study the sermon preached by our pastor or use a Bible study guide that we all find personally beneficial. We truly enjoy each other’s presence, and we put a high priority on the group and the members in the group. We even do something social once each month. We rise to the occasion when someone has a need, and there is a sense that we are friends.41
Boren contends most church small groups in America are in this category. People learn to adjust their lives away from the influences and pull of the predominant culture. The experience at Heathmont Baptist Church is somewhere between the two types.
40 Boren, Missional Small Groups, 39.
41 Ibid., 40.
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According to Boren missional small group requires an intimate dance between three rhythms: Missional Communion, Missional Relating, and Missional Engagement.
These three rhythms provide a useful guide for the strategy discussed in Chapters 6 and 7 for they integrate the spiritual formation and relational aspects of small group life to the mission. For this reason it is appropriate to observe Boren’s explanation of these rhythms.
In a thirteen week study guide to the book Missional Small Groups, Boren succinctly defines Missional Communion as the practice of God's presence, It is “a way of connecting with God and encountering His presence together, that shapes our life patterns so that we are no longer shaped by those of this world but changed from the inside out and thereby can impact people in our neighborhoods.”42 We encounter God through spiritual practices, namely Prayer, Worship, Listening to God through scripture, and
Practicing Jesus meal together. Missional Relating is the practice of agape, it is “a way of loving one another that stands in contrast to the typical relational patterns of the culture, a life of mutual service and self-sacrifice that is visible to others and impacts them.”43
Missional Engagement is “A way of connecting with God and encountering His presence together, that shapes our life patterns so that we are no longer shaped by those of this world but changed from the inside out and thereby can impact people in our neighborhoods.”44 It is “practiced as a community of people focused on being present in a
42 Scott Boren, “Missional Groups, a 13-week Study guide,” http://www.google .com.au /url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCIQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Froxburghmiss ionalnet.com%2Fpdfs%2Fmisssmallgroup_study.pdf&ei=BoKOUN7IF4uQiQep0ICQDw&usg=AFQjCN GQIvUAUsJhUQXbs8FvsNWMshgUAQ (accessed June 18, 2012), 13.
43 Boren, Missional Small Groups, 137.
44 Boren, “Missional Groups, a 13-week Study guide,” 13. 68 specific time and place. It is about living in the local and being focused on doing the small stuff of the kingdom for a specific group of people so they can actually experience and feel the life of Christ in and through the community.”45
After building the case for the three rhythms, Boren outlines seven practices for each rhythm. It is important to note that the usual practices identified with small groups are placed under the frame of the mission intent of the church.
Being missional is about who we are, not just what we do. Therefore missional life is not simply about the body of Christ having hands and feet so we do something for the world. Living missionally depends on how we relate to God and how we relate to one another as much as how we relate to those outside the church … Christianity requires community if it is going to be modeled correctly. We learn to live and love as Christ would have us do and we invite others into the experience. The way we pray, the way we experience God, the way we interact with each other, and the way we deal with conflict is just as missional as anything we might do for those outside the church.46
The way we as a small group worship and study God's word together can be done in such a way that we are propelled towards greater, more visible missional engagement in our neighborhoods and communities.
Boren treats a little too lightly the issue of discipleship and the making and formation of disciples in the context of mission. There is also no significant treatment on how accountability might be best created to effectively facilitate the success of such groups to be missional. However, Boren does refer to other works the reader can turn to
45 Boren, Missional Small Groups, 62, 63.
46 Ibid., 63.
69 for further equipping.47 Finally, instructive to the process involved transitioning a church to become more disciples in mission based is Boren’s warning that this is a journey.
The Missional Church
The Forgotten Ways - Alan Hirsch
How did the early Christian movement grow so significantly and rapidly and significantly? How did it do this whilst it was under persecution and without all of the things that today’s church defines as vital for ministry such as buildings, a defined
Scripture, professional clergy? These are the opening questions of The Forgotten Ways.
In examining various “Jesus Movements,” as well as the more recent underground
Chinese church, Hirsch concludes that there was a missional DNA at work he titles
“mDNA.”48 He then identifies six elements of what he calls “Apostolic genius,” a term used to describe the aggregate of these six elements: (1) Jesus is Lord, (2) Disciple
Making, (3) Missional-Incarnational Impulse, (4) Apostolic Environment, (5) Organic
Systems, and (6) Communitas instead of community. Says Hirsch,
Loaded into the term Apostolic Genius is the full combination of all the elements of mDNA that together form a constellation, as it were, each shedding light on the others. I also believe it is latent, or embedded, into the very nature of God’s gospel people. I suggest that when all the elements of mDNA are present and are in dynamic relationship with the other elements, and an adaptive challenge acts as a catalyst, then Apostolic Genius is activated.49
47 One such work Boren refers to is: Alan J. Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader: Equipping Your Church to Reach a Changing World (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2006), which is included in the literature review discussion in this chapter.
48 Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006), 77.
49 Ibid., 274. 70
The activation of the Apostolic Genius can ultimately lead to the development of a missional church, meaning that the church is defined and organized around the purpose of carrying out the mission of God.50
The mission of God centers on the concept of Jesus as Lord. “At its very heart,
Christianity is therefore a messianic movement, one that seeks to consistently embody the life, spirituality, and mission of its Founder.”51 There is a call for holiness and commitment to live according to the allegiance to Jesus as Lord, “‘Jesus is Lord’ is a radical claim, one that is ultimately rooted in questions of allegiance, of ultimate authority, of the ultimate norm and standard for human life … instead, Christianity has often sought to ally itself comfortably with allegiance to other authorities, be they political, economic, cultural, or ethnic.”52 The issue of Lordship of Christ and the application of its meaning is crucial in addressing the struggle people at Heathmont
Baptist Church are having with the issues of commitment and consumerism. Here, the second element of disciple-making is instructive.
The essential task of discipleship is to embody the message of Jesus the
Founder.53 The author writes, “When dealing with discipleship, and the related capacity to generate authentic followers of Jesus, we are dealing with that single most crucial
50 Ibid., 82.
51 Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, 94.
52 Ibid., 99.
53 Ibid., 102. 71 factor that in the end will determine the quality of the whole.”54 This is where Jesus invested his time and energy - the foundation of the whole Christian movement - in selecting and discipling his band of followers. The basis of disciple-making found in the narrative of Jesus and the early church leads to the critique that “many of our current practices seem to be the wrong way around … we seem to make church complex and discipleship too easy.”55
Hirsch idealizes the link between the success of early church movements and the potential success of the mDNA oriented church a little too much in his text; however his call to a disciple-making founded on the Lordship of Jesus is an important contribution.
No less so than in the challenge to consumerism that is a “major threat to the viability of our faith … this is a far more heinous and insidious challenge to the gospel because in so many ways it infects each and every one of us.”56 Consumerism as a “Religious phenomenon” is a threat propagated by advertising that is propagated by a “Sophisticated media machine.”57
Of interest to the issue small groups doing and being community whilst engaging in the mission of God is the notion of communitas.58 Communitas describes the type of communality or comradeship that was and is experienced in the phenomenal Jesus
54 Ibid., 102.
55 Ibid., 104.
56 Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, 106, 107.
57 Ibid., 107, 109.
58 As Hirsch points out, Anthropologist Victor Tuner coins the terms liminality and communitas to describe the transition process accompanying a change of state/social position – e.g. boys in African tribes, ejected from the community into the bush, returning with a bond of comradeship and communality forged in the testing conditions of liminality. They come back different. This is communitas. Hirsch, Ibid., 220. 72 movements.59 The church as a community that embodies the Gospel, that reflects the kingdom of God in their entire way of life “takes on a nature of community that is dynamic, focused on the common mission that creates the bond of a shared adventure in working to achieve a common task.” 60 Communitas happens when we are pushed out of our normal safe zones and put in situations of disorientation, marginalization, and challenge, such as happens on a short-term mission trip. Bonded together in mission, and outside the comfort zone people depend upon each other to survive as they accomplish their mission. Hirsch argues that communitas is the antidote to the obsession with comfort and convenience that threatens the gospel and the missional church.61
The text is not practically instructive in how a church might transition its existing small groups to be communitas. It also has limitations in its view of ecclesiology. In
Hirsch’s view Christology determines missiology which then determines ecclesiology.
Stetzer confronts the linear aspect of Hirsch’s approach arguing that Christology, missiology, and ecclesiology, are an ongoing conversation and interaction of theological disciplines.62 Stetzer calls this “The Missional Matrix.”63
59 Ibid., 218.
60 Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st-century Church (Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 2003), 83.
61 Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, 219.
62 Ed Stetzer, http://www.edstetzer.com/2011/06/musings-on-the-manifesto-part-6.html (accessed October 16, 2012).
63 Ed Stetzer, http://churchplantingnovice.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/stetzer-missional- matrix.jpg (accessed October 16, 2012).
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Stetzer explains:
How we do mission flows from our understanding of God's mission and directs our missiology. How we do church is grounded in Scripture but applied in culture. Thus we have the intersection of who Jesus is and what he has sent us to do (Christology); the forms and strategies we use to most effectively expand the kingdom where we are sent (missiology); and the expression of the New Testament church that is most appropriate in this context (ecclesiology).64
Nevertheless, The Forgotten Ways provides a strong biblical and theological rationale calling the people of God to rediscover the missional intent and purposes of God.
64 Ed Stetzer and David Putman, Breaking the Missional Code: When Churches Become a Missionary in Their Community (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2006), 53. 74
CHAPTER 4
A THEOLOGY OF THE CHURCH AS DISCIPLES-IN-MISSION
Chapter 4 considers the ecclesiological context that has informed Heathmont
Baptist Church, noting various strengths and weaknesses of the theological influences.
Biblical reflection lays foundation for understanding the purposes and intent of the
Christian Church as the sent people of God empowered by His Spirit to be make known the Gospel and make disciples. The theology of the church is considered, particularly in how this informs the challenge to transition the focus of the Heathmont Baptist Church discipleship based mission, and through the development of the small groups program.
A Church Heritage of Evangelical Baptist Theology
Heathmont Baptist Church, as indicated by the statements of beliefs, is a church in formed from an evangelical persuasion. It holds to the classic evangelical doctrines such as belief in the divine inspiration and authority of the scriptures, the existence of
God in three persons, the deity and incarnation of Jesus Christ who is the Son of God, the work of the Holy Spirit to regenerate humans, and the necessity of repentance towards
75
God and faith in the Lord Jesus for salvation.1 This evangelical heritage is profoundly impacting on the challenge that presents in transitioning the congregation to being disciples in mission oriented. Following a brief summation of the Baptist distinctives that have been and are formative in the Heathmont Baptist Church’s expression as a community of faith, I will outline both a positive impact and negative impact. When speaking of Baptist distinctives for the purposes of this project I am referring to the framework described by Rowland Croucher:2 “The argument for a distinctive Baptist identity, then, has shifted from the early position of privileging one issue (such as believer’s baptism) to the celebration of a constellation of biblically-based principles and practices the sum of which is not presently reflected in other faith communities.”3
A long time earlier in 1947 British Baptist historian Henry Cook wrote in his pamphlet What Baptists Stand For, “The convictions of Baptists are based primarily on the spiritual nature of the church, and the practice of believers’ baptism arises only as a corollary of this and in the light of NT teaching.”4 It should also be noted that Baptist identity holds doctrinal beliefs not unique to Baptists. The authority of Scripture,
Christology and the Trinity, that are common among Baptists, can typically be found in other Christian groups. However these beliefs are central to an understanding of the
1 As referred to in the Heathmont Baptist Church constitution.
2 Rowland Croucher was a former member of the Heathmont Baptist Church after having served as senior pastor of Melbourne’s largest Baptist Church. He is a well-known Australian Church commentator, blogger and consultant as the Director of John Mark Ministries.
3 Rowland Croucher, Why I Am A Baptist, January 5, 2003 http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/9014.htm (accessed October 10, 2012).
4 Henry Cook, What Baptists Stand for (London: Kingsgate Press, 1947), 17. 76
Heathmont Baptist identity. In recognizing there are various Baptist distinctives, I will be limiting the focus on the disctinctives that are most relevant to the subject of discipleship and mission.
The Authority of Scripture
Since their origins, Baptists on the whole have believed Scripture to be their final authority.5 In the Baptist Union of Victoria Doctrinal Basis statement the first statement affirms: “The divine inspiration and supreme authority of the Scriptures of the Old and
New Testaments.”6 Heathmont Baptist Church as a member of the Baptist Union has aligned itself with this in theory and in practice. In a booklet entitled “Who are the
Baptists?” Dr. Ken Manley outlines the basic distinctives of Baptist beliefs. The first one listed is The Lordship of Christ and the authority of the scriptures.7 The fundamental principle of the Baptists is their belief in the supreme authority and absolute sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures; and their separate existence is the practical and logical result of their attempt to apply this principle in all matters of faith and religion.8
Baptist Theologian Millard Erickson concludes that God’s Word is inspired, thus preserving God’s special revelation, “By inspiration of scripture we mean that supernatural influence of the Holy Spirit on the Scripture writers which rendered their
5 L. Russ Bush and Tom Nettles, Baptists and the Bible (Chicago: Moody Press, 1980), 18.
6 From Baptist Union of Victoria website http://www.buv.com.au/aboutus?tmp l=omponent &print=1(accessed October 10, 2012).
7 Ken R. Manley, Who are the Baptists (Hawthorn, Victoria: Clifford Press, 1982).
8 Baptist Why and Why Not (Nashville: Sunday School Board, Southern Baptist Convention, 1900), 26. 77
writings an accurate record of the revelation or which resulted in what they wrote actually being the Word of God.”9 The Bible has the right to command belief or action “by authority of the Bible we mean that the Bible as the expression of God’s will to us, possesses the right supremely to define what we are to believe and how we are to conduct ourselves.”10 A theological commitment to the inspiration and authority of scripture provides a solid foundation for applying importance and urgency to the call to Heathmont
Baptist Church to discover a greater sense of being disciples-in-mission. It also provides a sympathetic platform for a healthy critique of the way Heathmont Baptist Church expresses herself as a faith community.
I agree with Missional Leader Ed Stetzer that Scripture must be our guide to truly understand what the mission is,
In many ways, we want our thoughts to resemble the Reformers' tenant (sic) on Sola scriptura. Sola scriptura was the idea that the Bible includes all knowledge necessary for things like salvation and holiness. And while many could add more to this list, for the sake of our discussion today, I would add mission as well … We live in a unique time in history when authority of any kind is questioned. I get that. Authority has been abused. But when it comes to the things of God - and particularly the mission of God - we must be careful not to sidestep God's primary revelation of Himself in His Word. If God has graciously disclosed Himself to us in the Scriptures, we can trust that His thoughts on what His mission looks like will be good and gracious. So as we move forward in this conversation, we commit to sitting under the authority of the Scriptures. To let His words be our words. To let His thoughts be our thoughts. To let His mission be our mission.11
9 Millard J Erickson, Christian Theology, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2000), 225.
10 Ibid., 267.
11 Ed Stetzer, “Musings On the Missional Manifesto, part 1 Scripture,” http://www.edstetzer.com /2011/05/last-week-i-announced-at.html.(accessed October 4, 2012). 78
If there has been a negative impact of the Baptist emphasis on the authority and centrality of scripture I believe it has been through the attachment to being focused on spending much more time in the cognitive process of hearing, reading and studying the Word to the detriment of applying the teachings of the Word and living out the call and challenge of the narrative of scripture in the world we live in.12 Perhaps a great enemy to the advance of the strategy of this project and to activity that furthers the mission of God is the propensity of evangelical Christians, to be hearers of the word but not doers of the word.
This is a limitation not restricted to the twenty-first century as revealed in James’ words to the early church in James 1:22 “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.”13
The Lordship of Christ
There is amongst Baptist Churches and at Heathmont Baptist Church the strongly held belief that a local church ought to be responsible to no external authority other than
Christ who is the Head of the church. As Manley articulates in stating the first Baptist
12 I believe that a significant contributing factor to over-emphasis on the learning of scripture as against the ‘doing’ what the scriptures teach is in the western information oriented system of learning prevalent in our culture. Thomas Groome speaking of Christian religious education makes the point of the need for a praxis in the way we learn as Christians “The nature and purposes of Christian religious education require that we promote personal cognition as a critically reflective, dialectical, and dialogical process that encourages a “right relationship” between knower and known in a community of discourse and that we broaden our concern beyond simply cognition. This incarnational principle that stands at the heart of Christianity demands a pedagogy that is grounded in and shapes people’s ontic selves – their identity and agency in the world. For instance, our aim is not simply that people know about justice; but that they be just, not only understand compassion but that they be compassionate, and so on. We are, then, to attend to all dimensions of human “being” and articulate our most philosophical foundation and task as ontological rather than simply epistemological. We need to make an “ontological turn” in the very foundations of Christian religious education.” Thomas H. Groome, Sharing Faith: A Comprehensive Approach to Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry (Eugene OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1991), 8.
13 James 1:22. All Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible: New International Version (Grand Rapids, Biblica, 2011), unless otherwise noted. 79
distinctive “we believe that to be a Christian one must confess Jesus Christ as Lord. Jesus reveals himself through the Bible, which is the authority for us on matters of faith and practice.”14 British Baptist George Beasley-Murray notes, “The church, whether local or universal, is only the church in so far as it relates to Christ as its Redeemer and its
Head.”15 Hence the Lordship of Christ is “the root principle from which all the others evolve.”16 The belief of Jesus Christ as Lord is fundamental to the ensuing discussion relevant to this project, concerning on the nature and purpose of the Church and the missional imperative. Nicholas Thomas Wright observes, “The way in which Jesus now exercises his rule in the world [is] through the church, which is his Body.”17 As Stetzer puts it, “Missiology is birthed from our understanding of who Jesus is.”18 Therefore, as
Frost and Hirsch highlight, “It is time to recalibrate the church around the person of Jesus rather than around marketing ploys developed for a shallow consumeristic age.”19
14 Manley, Who are the Baptists.
15 G.W. Beasley-Murray as quoted in Rowland Croucher, Why I Am A Baptist.
16 James Donovan Mosteller, “Basic Baptist Principles and the Contemporary Scene,” Southwestern Journal of Theology 6 (April 1964), 61.
17 N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 217.
18 Ed Stetzer, “Musings On the Missional Manifesto Part 6 Christocentricity,” http://www. edstetzer.com/2011/06/musings-on-the-manifesto-part-6.html (accessed October 4, 2012).
19 Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, ReJesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 2009), 15.
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Regenerate Church Membership
For Baptists, “regenerate” church membership refers to salvation as a birth or beginning of new life. The following New Testament passages are used as a basis: John
1:13; 3:3, 5; Romans 6:4; 2Cor 5:17; Ephesians 4:24; Col 3:10; Titus 3:5; James 1:18, 21;
1Peter 1:3; 2Peter 1:4; 1John 3:9. Josef Nordenhaug outlines the common view amongst
Baptists and that held at Heathmont Baptist Church: “Baptists have held and do now hold that through personal faith in the Lord Jesus Christ a man is born again by the Holy Spirit and that baptism is the dramatic picture (homoioma) of the believer’s participation in the death and the resurrection of Christ (Rom 6:4-5). Through personal faith and baptism he becomes a member of the church.”20
This belief is significant as there is an inextricable relationship between God’s people as a spiritual community and the mandate to make disciples. The church, Richard
Bauckham writes,
Should be the community from which the blessing of Abraham, experienced in Jesus, overflows to others. The church should be the people who have recognized God as he truly is in God’s revelation in Jesus and therefore make that revelation known to others. The church is those people who, so far, acknowledge God’s rule as he is implementing it in Jesus and live for others in the light of the coming of his kingdom in all creation.21
Willard in The Divine Conspiracy elucidates the meaning of the “spiritual” identity of the
Christ follower, “For it is in persons, or ‘selves’ - and their experiences of feeling,
20 Josef Nordenhaug, “Baptists and a Regenerate Church Membership” Excerpts from an article first published in Review and Expositor 60, no. 2(Spring, 1963), http://sites.silaspartners .com/cc/article/0,,PTID314526_CHID598016_CIID1918150,00.html (accessed October 8, 2012).
21 R. Bauckham, The Bible and Mission: Christian Witness in a Postmodern World (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 49. 81
thought, and will - that we primarily come to know precisely what the spiritual is.
‘Spiritual’ is not just something we ought to be. It is something we are and cannot escape, regardless of how we may think or feel about it. It is our nature and our destiny.”22 If the
Church indeed is sent by God, then it is imperative that the members who make up the church are shaped by God.
There is a challenge in this day-and-age in regards to whether churches are taking regenerate membership seriously. John Hammett, who is a professor of systematic theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, devotes two chapters to the dilemma of an unregenerate church membership in his book, Biblical Foundations for
Baptist Churches: A Contemporary Ecclesiology. Hammett challenges the Baptists, who call themselves believers but do not behave as believers,
Moreover, the conduct of Baptist church members outside the church attendance is also alarming. Reports find almost no difference in the rate of divorce among Baptists and the culture as a whole. Many Baptists are enmeshed in alcoholism, addiction to pornography, spousal and child abuse, adultery, and virtually every other evil the world offers. One can live a life with no visible difference from the surrounding non-regenerate world and be a member in good standing of a Baptist church.23
Bonhoeffer comments on the church as the community that is “Not only the receiver of the Word of revelation; it is itself revelation … the community is the body of Christ.”24
22 Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, 79.
23 John S. Hammett, Biblical Foundations for Baptist Churches: A Contemporary Ecclesiology (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2005), 109, 110, 116.
24 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 60. 82
The Priority of Evangelism and Mission
Whilst not stated in the general list of distinctives as a stand-alone belief, the commitment to evangelism and the mission of the Church is a widely held Baptist priority within its identity. On the Australian Baptist Union website, the chairperson John
Beasy writes, “Australian Baptist Ministries is an evangelical movement of churches,
State Baptist Unions and national ministries committed to proclaiming and demonstrating the Gospel of Jesus Christ as revealed in the Scriptures.”25 The priority of evangelism and mission for Baptists draws from the doctrine of regenerate church membership. Baptists have always required prospective members to give evidence of conversion since only the regenerate should be allowed to join the church as indicated by the biblical concept of church discipline (1 Cor. 5:12).26
The Priesthood of All Believers
Croucher states: “The doctrine of the priesthood of all believers had two implications: there was no need for a mediating priest to stand between the believer and
God; and no one person or group had any special claim on spirituality or access to God, although gifted and effective leaders were regularly set apart for particular ministries such as preaching and pastoral care.”27 This doctrine of the priesthood of all believers promotes the importance of applying practically a theology of the church that see the
25 John Beasy states this in his welcoming message on the website http://www.baptist.org.au/ (accessed October 5, 2012).
26 Greg Wills, “The Church: Baptists and Their Churches in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Polity: Biblical Arguments on How to Conduct Church Life, ed. Mark Dever (Washington: Center for Church Reform, 2001), 22.
27 Croucher, “Why I Am A Baptist.” 83
responsibility for the mission of the Church as the responsibility of all members of the body of Christ. Secondly, it implies the responsibility for God given leadership for his church to be equippers of the body in order that the Church effectively fulfills her calling to follow Jesus in mission. The scripture Ephesians Chapter 4:11–12 states: “So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up.” There are serious questions this raises about the nature of training of clergy for ministry. In my
Baptist setting in Melbourne, until recently the orientation of pastor training has been around the academic comprehension of theology, the ministry of preaching and the pastoral care of church members. This has exacerbated the reliance of the pastor as the professional one who “does” the ministry and it has led to a lack of preparation for pastors to be a cultivator of mission by the congregation.
A significant obstacle to discipleship and mission has been the bureaucratization of church function and organization created by forms of congregational government. This evolved from the doctrine of priesthood of believers in earlier periods when Baptist churches were small in size and reflective of smaller family systems. Many Baptist congregations have created a structure of organization a bureaucratic control model where members want to retain control of much of the decision making which results in an inertia regarding ministry and mission. Paul Borden makes an observation applicable to
Australia, and in particular to the Heathmont Baptist Church, “Most congregations in the
United States are designed to be small, remain small, and function ineffectively in the twenty-first century. These structures, from their inception until now, reflect the cultures
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in which they were created.”28 Borden in an earlier work argues that many church systems are led by people with small and dysfunctional congregational mentalities that have restrained the kind of entrepreneurial leadership that facilitates the effective mission of the Church.29 This is not an insignificant problem for one that believes, as I do, that an apostolic impulse is necessary to fuel missional engagement amongst the people of God.
Biblical Reflections on the Christian Church
Scripture provides a rich and formative instruction on the nature, purpose and function of the Church and the call to Christ followers to be disciples-in-mission. In the next chapter biblical reflection is presented on the notion of discipleship, but we begin with a theological understanding of the Church.
The Call to Join God’s Redemptive Mission in Genesis 12:1-3
The Church’s purpose and intent is framed by the call of God from the beginning of history. God who has blessed His people calls them to, in turn be a blessing to all people. William Dumbrell says, “What is being written in these few verses is a theological blueprint for the redemptive history of the world.”30 For a good understanding of Genesis 12: 1-3, it is crucial that it be viewed in the context of the eleven chapters that precede it. Genesis Chapters 1-11 deals with Creation and then the spread of sin and its
28 Paul Borden, Direct Hit: Aiming Real Leaders at the Mission Field (Nashville: Abingdon, 2006), 21.
29 Paul Borden, Hit the Bullseye: How Denominations Can Aim the Congregation At the Mission Field (Nashville: Abingdon, 2003), 59.
30 William J. Dumbrell, Covenant and Creation (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2009), 66. 85
consequences. In these chapters there is the rebellion of Adam and Eve bringing themselves and their offspring into judgment by God. There is the first murder (Cain and
Abel, Chapter 4) and the first abandonment of God by a collective society (Tower of
Babel, Chapter 1). Against this background we have what is commonly referred to as the
Abrahamic covenant.
1 The LORD had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. 2 “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”
As we consider the mission of God’s people to join in his purposes, these verses recounting God's call and promise to Abraham, and Abraham's response, provides the first theological platform for understanding the church. The nature of God as the one who
“sends” is revealed at the outset of the story of the people of God. Obedience to the call of God to “go” beyond the comfort zone and to be a blessing to others is the challenge that faces Abraham, and similarly faces the church today. Most commentators view
God’s command as a test of Abram’s faith,
He must decide whether to abandon his land in favor of the land Yahweh offers. He must decide whether to abandon what family he still has in favor of the family Yahweh promises (against all logic, given Sarai’s infertility). He must decide whether to set aside his blessing, his inheritance, for the inheritance Yahweh describes. The initiative offers much, but its cost is significant. Abram must trust
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Yahweh to deliver what he has offered in order to give up so much that Abram already has to gain.31
The call of God provides an authority and mandate for the purposes of God to be carried out. The response of Abraham to go by his faith and obedience is heralded by early church leaders: Stephen in Acts 7:2-4 and the writer of Hebrews (Hebrews11:8).
At the end of the promise by God to Abraham we read “And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (12:3). The Hebrew word translated “peoples” in
NIV (“families” in NASB, NKJV) refers to a group between a tribe and an extended family.32 There is disagreement amongst scholars about whether the last phrase of the verse should be translated “shall be blessed” (passive voice) or “shall bless themselves”
(reflexive voice). This is an important distinction for “shall be blessed” would establish the divine purpose of salvation for all humankind. Matthews contends “The passive translation probably suits the context of the passage best, since God is the source.”33 This is consistent with the idea of a divine plan, which the tenor of the entire book conveys by the motif of an exclusive family (chosen).34 We see the missional motif in the calling of
Abraham to act upon faith by leaving his home for an unknown destination: that he and his descendants would become identified with God Himself and through that nation the entire world would be blessed.
31 John H. Walton, Genesis: The NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2001), 392.
32 Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15: Word Biblical Commentary, Vol. 1 (Waco, Texas: WordBooks, 1987), 278.
33 Kenneth A Mathews, Genesis 11:27-50:26, The New American Commentary, Vol. 1B (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2005), 117-118.
34 Ibid. 87
The Church as a Holy Spirit Empowered Redemptive Community Acts 2:42-47
The book of Acts bears witness to the church as community formed as the fruit of the outpouring of the Spirit and the teaching of the apostles. The mood is one of excitement and the atmosphere is eschatological with the outpouring of the Spirit being
35 seen as a sign of the last day and the imminence of the Kingdom. Barrett comments that
“Luke wished his readers to see what the life of the Christians was like in the apostolic period in order that they might imitate it … His story is not simply a series of biographies but the story of a community.”36 It is the story of a faith community that was informed and prepared by Jesus the Christ. In a discourse with His disciples in which they were asking the question whether Jesus would restore the Kingdom of Israel, Jesus says to them “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority.
But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (Acts
1:8). The community of disciples who had spent forty days with Jesus being taught about the Kingdom of God were to be empowered to live and function as the community shaped by the Spirit of God living missionally. John Stott calls this text the “Beautiful cameo of the Spirit filled church.”37 We have a snapshot of the demonstration of the
Kingdom of God on earth,
35 C.K. Barrett, Acts 1-14 (ICC, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2004), 160.
36 Ibid.
37 John RW Stott, The Message of Acts (Leicester: IVP, 1990), 81.
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42 They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. 43 Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. 44 All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45 They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. 46 Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, 47 praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.
There is very little doubt that the author of the book of Acts is Luke the physician, who also wrote the Gospel of Luke. Luke composed his second volume, the Acts of the
Apostles, as a sequel to the Gospel of Luke. From the beginning, he seems to have envisioned a two-part work, as inferred by Acts 1:1b-2, “In my former book, Theophilus,
I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen.”
As the book of Acts and particularly this 2:42-47 text, is so popularly identified with as an example and model of how the church should practice her faith, it is worth noting that some scholars have questioned the historicity of Luke’s account in Acts seeing it as a theological construct to support Luke’s ideals for the Church. This criticism has been countered by scholars such as Hengel who states that Luke is a “historian and theologian who needs to be taken seriously … We only do justice to the significance of
Luke as the first theological ‘historian’ of Christianity if we take his work seriously as a source.”38 Bosch says, “Luke was first and foremost a theologian … He was not a mere chronicler of history … His interest was in the way the Gentile mission was to be motivated theologically not in an history report of the origins and course of the
38 Martin Hengel, Acts and the History of Earliest Christianity (London: SCM Press, 1979), 61, 67. 89
mission.”39 Dunn believes that even should the portrayal be “somewhat idealized” by
Luke, “Anyone who is familiar with movements of enthusiastic spiritual renewal will recognize authentic notes: the enthusiasm of the members of the renewal group, with a sense of overflowing joy (2:46), desire to come together frequently (2:44, 46), eating together and worshipping (2:46-47), and including the readiness for unreserved commitment to one another in a shared common life.”40 The hermeneutical question of whether Acts should be read descriptively as a historical account of the earliest church, or prescriptively as a model and paradigm for the church today is relevant to the discussion in this project. A common conclusion is that the book is primarily descriptive, although containing prescription as well, which one must derive cautiously from the text.41
The disciples had a powerful encounter of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost as the Holy Spirit came upon them. Peter, with an anointing of the Spirit upon him preaches and 3,000 were converted. Following this, verse 42 begins “And they were devoting themselves (proskartereo) to the teaching of the apostles and to the koinonia.”
Having had such a powerful experience with the Holy Spirit that day, the disciples immediately “began devoting themselves” to a new lifestyle in light of Pentecost.42 The
Holy Spirit is not mentioned in this passage but the placing of the summary after the
39 David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 1991), 87.
40 James D.G. Dunn, The Acts of the Apostles (Peterborough: Epworth, 1996), 34.
41 Walter A. Elwell and Robert W. Yarborough, Encountering the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998), 212, 213.
42 Deborah M. Gill, “Breaking Bread and Prayer,” http://www.geii.org /archives /2011 WPCU /wpcu_commentary_on_the_scriptural_text.htm (accessed October 14, 2012).
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Pentecost stories and the words of Peter in 2:38 support Dunn’s argument that it was
Pentecost which saw the beginning of this fundamental character of Christian community as growing out of the shared experience of the Spirit.43 The community is characterized by commitment that is in response to the presence of the Holy Spirit. The role and work of the Holy Spirit in creating and sustaining the identity and purpose of the church as
Jesus intended cannot be underestimated. God’s purposes unfold as drawn from God himself. Seng Kong-Tan writes,
God creates and missionizes from his overflowing fullness, freedom and love … It is only in our relation to Christ, the God-man that, by Christ we become what we were created to be, viz. truly human. Moreover, we are also recreated to be “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet.1: 4), i.e. to participate in God’s divine light, communicable holiness, and relational life through the energies of the Spirit.44
The Holy Spirit continues the work of Jesus and His mission,
Just as Jesus’ baptism and anointing with the Spirit in Luke 3 is to be understood as standing behind and explaining everything else, from his ‘Messianic’ proclamation in Luke 4 to his messianic death and resurrection, so that coming of the Spirit in Acts 2 is to be understood as standing behind and explaining everything else that the church then does, particularly its worship, its mission and its bold stand in obeying God rather than human authorities. Thus, when Luke later tells us that the Christians gathered together were all filled with the Spirit and spoke God’s word with boldness, this should be understood not as a fresh and momentary filling, repeating Pentecost as it were on a strictly temporary basis, but as a fresh manifestation of what had been the case all along since Pentecost itself. The church from Acts 2 onwards is the Spirit-led church.45
43 Dunn, The Acts of the Apostles, 35.
44 Seng-Kong Tan, “A Trinitarian Ontology of Missions,” (International Review of Missions, April, 2004).
45 N.T. Wright, “Worship and the Spirit in the New Testament” text from message given at Yale Conference on Worship and the Spirit: February 21–23, 2008, http://ntwrightpage.com /Wright _Yale Worship_Spirit.htm (accessed October 15, 2012). 91
The Church as initiated and shaped by the Holy Spirit has ecclesiological implications for today. One is that the church can be viewed as being the agency for proclaiming the kingdom of God, not the end-product. Darrell Guder says, “The church of Jesus Christ is not the purpose or goal of the gospel, but rather its instrument and witness.”46 Commenting on this, Bell observes, “We have structured our ministries as though the gospel's purpose was to serve the church. We talk as though the church is the point. But the church itself is not the point. Instead, the good news of God's reign is the main point, and the church is the organism that embodies, serves, and proclaims the reality of the gospel, even though the church would never have existed had it not been for the gospel.”47
The church today must see its energy, focus and activity on implementing the
Kingdom of God on earth as “The Holy Spirit motivates people to live like Jesus, to lean into the Kingdom, to serve, and to forgive. Just as Jesus was, Christians are to be in their cultures everywhere and at every time. The Holy Spirit will lead those who are willing to live in the Kingdom and to participate in God’s mission through the proclamation of the gospel until the return of Christ.”48
The disciples in 2:42 were devoting themselves (proskartereo) to the teaching of the apostles, to the koinonia and to the breaking of bread and prayer. The word for
46 Darrell Guder, Missional Church (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.,1998), 5.
47 Ryan Bell, “The Shaping of the Emerging Church,” Ministry International Journal for Pastors (September 2004), http://www.ministrymagazine.org/archive/2004/November/the-shaping-of-the- emerging-church-part-2.html (accessed October 8, 2012).
48 Gibbs and Bolger, Emerging Churches, 60.
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“devote” is proskartereo (προσκαρτερέω). It means to persist in adherence to, a thing; to be intently engaged in, attend constantly to. The use of proskartereo denotes a commitment on the part of the disciples, as “The community is characterized by commitment,”49 hence we find expressed here “one important aspect of the vitality and power of the NT church.”50 There is a clear challenge to the current expression of church when considering the lack of commitment prevalent by the majority of church members in the midst of the busyness and discontinuity of everyday life.
Luke tells us the disciples were committed to the “teaching of the apostles”
(2:42). Luke is not explicit about the content of the apostles’ teaching in verse 42. Dunn argues that “The apostles are the medium and the guarantors of the teaching focused on fresh interpretations of the scriptures and beginning to order the memories of Jesus’ teaching and ministry into forms suitable for instruction, worship and proclamation.”51
They were also committed to koinonia (κοινωνία), which has been popularly translated as
“fellowship.” Strong defines the word as meaning partnership, (a) contributory help, participation, (b) sharing in, communion, (c) spiritual fellowship, a fellowship in the
Spirit.52 Etymologically, the word koinonia basically signifies a common share that a
49 Barrett, Acts 1-14, 163.
50 Gerhard Kittel, Gerhard Friedrich, and Geoffrey William Bromiley, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1985), 417.
51 Dunn, The Acts of the Apostles, 35.
52 James Strong, John R. Kohlenberger, and James A. Swanson, The Strongest Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, no. G2842 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001), 447.
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person may enjoy with someone in something.53 Nicholas Sagosvky points out, “An
English translation of Acts 2:42 might be either ‘community’ or ‘fellowship’, with an emphasis on the participative common life, or ‘communion’ where communion is realized in actual community.”54 Ben Witherington views fellowship as not a very helpful translation, for fellowship is the result of koinonia, of sharing in common; it is not the koinonia itself.55
The correct understanding of koinonia has a critical bearing on the challenge being undertaking at Heathmont Baptist Church to become a disciples-in-mission oriented congregation. Fellowship is to be interpreted not as a passive end to the gathering together as an ekklesia, but rather be an active participation in community that happens because there is commitment demonstrated in koinonia. Such a concept of community as communitas of the sent people of God on mission has significant implications for this project. The importance of the place and meaning that communitas brings to a group is relevant to this project’s focus on small groups. Church community cannot be reduced to a self-focused consumer oriented grouping of people. Nor can it be focused mainly on the needs of its own participants as communitas has by its very DNA a
53 See Henry George Liddel and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, Revised by Sir Henry Stuart Jones, 9th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 968.
54 Nicholas Sagovsky “Belonging in communion: The first churches,” https://docs.google.com /viewer?a=v&q=cache:A888x6PuU0MJ:www.theway.org.uk/Back/38Sagovsky.pdf+&hl=en&gl=au&pid= bl&srcid=ADGEESj1f2IwscJ5ZEpetqrcvLnye4mQfSXfgick_ltL2RlCz8dkvAhUyJofTPA8SIE_QvuMmjE DScMFAjqzV8y3wWb0ynsR1BeAvDFL7bozu5dlkGrcAfP1QIWi39W0Ww_J3Le7hV&sig=AHIEtbRRcI ep3IRJ-zgjuyd3ExJfr1x6jA (accessed October 15, 2012), 119.
55 Ben Witherington, The Acts of the Apostles: a Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), 160. 94
purpose that moves the community outside its own connectedness. Community should be far from static, mundane, even boring.
In Acts 2:42-47 the characteristics of church activity embody the aspects of discipleship as a community that simultaneously commits to growing in relation to their worship to God, to sharing in community with one another and in caring and reaching out to those in the wider community who are in need. Hermann Beyer maintains that in the
New Testament diakonia means both “‘waiting at table’ or in a rather wider sense
‘provision for bodily sustenance’” and also “any ‘discharge of service’ in genuine love.”56
The outworking of mission arises from the relationship the disciples have with God. Tan contends, “As holistic self-relation and relation with others proceed from our relation with God, so genuine human missions must arise from true contemplation. Prayer and missions are not in competition.” “On the contrary,” according to Jean Daniélou,
“mission appears as the self-unfolding of contemplation.”57
The disciples in Acts 2:42 demonstrate faith community as that lived under the
Lordship of Christ. Frost says “God as Father invites us to be his apprentice-children;
God as Son inspires us to participate in the extension of the Kingdom around the world;
God as Holy Spirit directs us to acknowledge Jesus as Lord and offers us every good gift in living it out.”58 The living as apprentice-children is apparent in 2:42 as the disciples
56 Hermann W. Beyer, ‘Diakonew, Diakonia, Diakonos,’ in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel, Geoffrey William Bromiley, and Gerhard Friedrich (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 1964), 81.
57 Tan, “A Trinitarian Ontology of Missions”.
58 Michael Frost, Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture (Massachusetts: Hendrickson, 2006), 146. 95
practice the spiritual community Jesus taught them. Dietrich Bonhoeffer states that the
Christian community is not an ideal, but a Divine reality. That is to say, the Christian community, the body of Christ, is not something which man can strive for nor create nor postulate hypothetically. Rather, it is the reality of Christ’s presence with His bride the
Church.59 Elsewhere Bonhoeffer says “The community is the body of Christ; it does not represent the Body of Christ.”60 Frost and Hirsch add, “Observers should be able to encounter Jesus in and through the life and community of his followers. People observing us ought to be able to discern the elements of Jesus’ ways in our ways. If they cannot find authentic signals of the historical Jesus through the life of his people, then as far as we are concerned they have the full right to question out legitimacy.”61
This understanding of the church informs our understanding of the mission of the church as, “living missionally depends on how we relate to God and how we relate to one another as much as how we relate to those outside the church.”62 Boren proposes that the very witness of the Gospel relies on the way followers of Jesus experience community amongst themselves: Christianity requires community if it is going to be modeled correctly. We learn to live and love as Christ would have us do and we invite others into the experience. The way we pray, the way we experience God, the way we interact with each other, and the way we deal with conflict is just as missional as anything we might do
59 Dietrich Bonheoffer, Life Together (New York: Harper Row, 1954), 26.
60 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 60.
61 Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, ReJesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church (Peabody Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 2009), 79.
62 Boren, Missional Small Groups, 63.
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for those outside the church.63 This bears significance when considering Hall’s assessment of the potentiality for the Christian church today to pursue meaningful community: “The quest for meaningful community, like the quest for authentic morality with which it is closely related, is also conspicuous today because of a double failure: the failure of individualism, and the failure of most forms of community.”64
The church is “a sign likewise when it lives as a community in the world … as those who have responded to the gospel call and acknowledge the lordship of Christ, we seek to model what it means to live under the guidelines of the divine reign.”65 Steve
Walton says, “To engage with the New Testament writings, and more widely those of early Christianity, without considering how the early believers understood their engagement with God is to neglect a major dimension of the life of the earliest Christians.
They understood themselves to be in communication with God and to be experiencing the life of God through the Spirit.”66
The Church lives its community in the world, for as Luke records “They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need” (Acts 2:45). We see the impact on the wider community of this witness to the reign of God: “And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved” (2:47). The church in the practice of
63 Ibid.
64 Douglas John Hall, The End of Christendom and the Future of Christianity (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1997), 59.
65 Ibid., 503.
66 Steve Walton, “A Spirituality of Acts?” in Steve Walton, Thomas E. Phillips, Lloyd Keith Pietersen, and F. Scott Spencer, eds., Reading Acts Today: Essays in Honour of Loveday C. A. Alexander, Library of New Testament Studies (London: T & T Clark, 2011), 186.
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community is a witnessing community and through its example, is “a sign, instrument and foretaste of God’s redeeming grace for the whole life of society.”67
Acts 2:42-47 is a picture that is consistent with Robert Webber’s description of the (missional) church, “The missional church … evangelizes primarily by immersing the unchurched in the experience of community … the medium [of evangelism] is the community of believers themselves.”68 The church by its very existence and practice of community is the witness to the divine reign of God. As Grenz states, “By being a true community of believers, we indicate what the reign of God is like; it is the community of love reign of God.”69
This “love” in 2:44, 45 is expressed by a care for those in need. Craig Blomberg notes that verses 43-47 “are dominated by highly marked imperfect tense verbs, whereas one normally expects aorist’s [once-for-all actions] in historical narrative.” These were instead, “periodic acts of charity as needs arose.”70 In these verses there are echoes of the common purse that Jesus shared with his disciples.71 These early believers contributed their goods freely, without coercion, voluntarily just as the Apostle Paul later instructs
Christians to give in just this manner, freely, for “God loves a cheerful giver.”
67 Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1985), 233.
68 Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Evangelism: Making Your Church a Faith-Forming Community (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2003), 62.
69 Grenz, Theology for the Community of God, 503.
70 Craig L. Blomberg, Neither Poverty nor Riches: A Biblical Theology of Possessions (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1999), 162, 165.
71 F. F. Bruce, The Book of the Acts, Rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), 74. 98
(2 Corinthians 9:8). We have therefore a Spirit-imbued community that demonstrates great generosity through their willing, voluntary giving.
These actions of the church community witnesses to the proclaimed gospel as preached by Peter in Acts 2:14-39. This is instructive for the concept of Christian community engaged in evangelism as part of a holistic living of the story of the Kingdom reign of God through Jesus Christ. Walter Brueggemann says, “Evangelism means inviting people into the stories (i.e. the stories of God’s promise, God’s deliverance or liberation, and God’s gifts) as the definitional story of our life, and thereby authorizing people to give up, abandon, and renounce other stories that have shaped their lives in false or distorting ways.”72 The church evangelizes through the proclamation of the gospel in words, deeds and the signs of the supernatural presence of God working by His
Holy Spirit. The experience shared by the congregation of St. Andrews Lutheran Church in Chicago illustrates this:
We are sent as a community of disciples and apostles to share God’s love. Because we were sent, we saw ourselves as a missional community, not a church focused on its own survival. Because we were a community not a collection of individuals we worked hard to promote fellowship that centered on Word and Sacrament rather than on personalities or events…with word, sacrament and Christian community as our missiological base we explored together what it might mean to live as disciples of Jesus in mission as a small congregation within our context of Chicago. As apostles we were sent and equipped to participate in God’s mission. Our commitment was to bring a ministry of love to our neighborhood.73
72 Walter Brueggemann, Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993), 10.
73 Richard H. Bliese and Craig Van Gelder, eds., The Evangelizing Church: A Lutheran Contribution (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2005), 49.
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CHAPTER 5
A THEOLOGY OF DISCIPLESHIP
Chapter Five begins with a consideration of the challenge and opportunities of postmodernity on the church and discipleship in mission. Biblical reflection provides the foundation for understanding discipleship and the relationship with mission. The implications for Christian community, mission, leadership and small groups are considered. The inextricable relationship between discipleship and mission is explored, leading to the conclusion that biblical discipleship cannot be separated from mission.
Finally, the role and function of leadership in cultivating disciples in mission is discussed.
The Challenge and Opportunity Presented by Postmodernity
In today’s society, for the church to “be” and “do” what it’s purposed for, and for the church to more intentionally express discipleship that actually engages in mission, a response to the influence and impact of Postmodernity is critical. The church’s mission to make disciples requires a contextual and adaptive response. As Frost and Hirsch define, contextualization is “The dynamic process whereby the constant message of the gospel interacts with specific relative human situations … contextualization attempts to 100
communicate the gospel in word and deed and to establish churches in way that make sense to people within their local cultural context.”1 Craig Van Gelder notes changes within the culture which have impacted Heathmont Baptist Church people’s understanding of the church. The dominant culture, influenced for decades by both the rationalistic strains of the Enlightenment and the moral influences of Christianity, has now become globalized and pluralized. Many “churches, dependent for many decades on the symbiotic relationship between church and culture, have become marginalized and fragmented.”2 This has been the effect of the shift from modernity to postmodernity.
Response to Post Modernism can either be moderate or extreme. Erikson distinguishes between two aspects of “soft” and “hard” postmodernism. The “soft” postmodernism on one hand tends to limit itself to the rejection of the extremes of modernism, namely “the dogmatic naturalism and anti-supernaturalism; the reductionist view of reason … the limitation of knowledge to sense experience … the restriction of the understanding of human personality as a set of stimulus-response reactions … and the naïve objectivity that denies the effect of historical and cultural situations.”3 The “hard” postmodernism is linked to deconstruction, which first seeks to deconstruct the foundations by identifying all the present elements science and modernism overlooks, e.g. cultural factors, personal values etc.; then rejects any possibility of objectivity and
1 Frost and Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come, 83.
2 Craig Van Gelder, “A Great New Fact of Our Day: America as a Mission Field,” in The Church Between Gospel and Culture: The Emerging Mission in North America, eds. George R. Hunsberger and Craig Van Gelder (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1996), 58.
3 M.J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998), 19. 101
rationality due to the presence of, “these previously unidentified elements.” This then leads to the conclusion that “there is no objective truth only that which is true for the interpreter.”4 The engagement with the world we live in is facilitated by an interaction with the soft postmodernism. If the Christ following church is meet people in the marketplace where people are, as the Apostle Paul did in Athens in Acts 17, then we can as believers “contend for the truth of the Christian faith, in contrast to a secular world that formerly excluded any faith of this type.”5
This provides a challenge for Heathmont Baptist Church in terms of understanding discipleship-in-mission. The church cannot proclaim propositional truth and expect the audience to merely accept it. What is called for is a demonstration of community that lives out truth in love, power and authenticity. Manifesting the love of
Christ through the sense of visible Christian community and corresponding action will present a far more accessible proclamation of the gospel and the truth Jesus Christ. By interacting with soft postmodernism it enables the church to dialogue with the people we are seeking to reach, in particular to reveal the lack of reality and consistency within postmodernism itself. As Francis Shaeffer suggests, we must take them to the limits of their paradigm before we can begin presenting our “truth.”6 In addition to this, by the very presence of Christians living out community in it’s very real and Spirit filled way,
4 Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith, 19.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., 154. 102
we enter into the frame of conversation with the wider society as the notion of
“community” is emphatic in postmodern thought. Says Millard Erickson elsewhere,
When postmodernism rejected the idea that truth and meaning simply exist independently of the knower, and substituted the idea that all knowers are conditioned by their background, culture, setting, and many other factors, it faced a potentially very serious problem. In theory, every person’s truth might be different from that of every other person, resulting in subjectivism. The check upon such subjectivism was to be found in the community, which establishes the norms of truth within its own bounds.7
The opportunity presented in this current day may have even strengthened if one was to agree with those that argue that we have now moved into a post-postmodern era. James
Parker III posits the view that we have moved from the postmodern to the trans modern,
The trans modern (a) rejects skepticism and subjectivism by affirming the possibility of attaining genuine knowledge … (b) takes the deliverances of empirical science seriously … (c) affirms the centrality of value, along with moral and theological knowledge, in rationally shaping and directing human experience; and (d) recognizes that the mere application of technology will neither rid the human heart of wretchedness or cruelty nor endow life with significance of nobility.8
If indeed, this is the case, the church has an ongoing challenge in positing truth. However there is significant opportunity to embody and demonstrate Kingdom values that offer a meaning and equilibrium to the human experience, as well as confronting the impact of technology and scientific advances on the human soul.
7 Millard Erickson, “On Flying in Theological Fog,” in Reclaiming the Center: Confronting Evangelical Accommodation in Postmodern Times, ed. Millard J. Erickson, Paul Kjoss Helseth, and Justin Taylor (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004), 340.
8 James Parker III, “A Requiem for Postmodernism - Whither Now?” in Reclaiming the Center: Confronting Evangelical Accommodation in Postmodern Times, ed. Millard J. Erickson, Paul Kjoss Helseth, and Justin Taylor (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004), 320. 103
The Commission of Jesus to His Group of Disciples to Go Make Disciples Matthew 28:18-20
Whilst the Old Testament does convey the message of a missionary God, mission and discipleship as it applies to the times we live in is more significantly informed by the biblical texts of the New Testament. In the text of Matthew 28:18-20 we have Great
Commission passage that has been associated as a foundational basis for modern mission.
18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
Bosch argues the entire gospel may be read as a missionary text and therefore the Great
Commission text must be understood in the context of entire gospel.
It is inadmissible to lift these words out of Matthew’s gospel … allow them a life of their own, and understand them without any reference to the context in which they first appeared … the “Great Commission” is perhaps the most Matthean in the entire gospel: virtually every word or expression used in these verses is peculiar to the author of the first gospel.9
The implication is that Matthew 28:20 can then be understood not so much as the life of
Jesus so much as a guide for the community of those who would follow Jesus by living out his teachings. Matthew understood that mission primarily in terms of discipleship.10
Often, this text has been used to inspire and motivate people for mission, especially to get involved with overseas mission, and the emphasis has been on the “go.”
However at the heart of Jesus’ commission is the imperative Greek verb (matheteusate)
9 David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 1991), 58.
10 Eddie Gibbs, Leadership Next: Changing Leaders in a Changing Culture (Leicester: IVP, 2005), 67. 104
translated “make disciples.” The common form of the Greek rendition is often referred to as mathetes. The definition of matheteusate has a huge impact on what Jesus is essentially saying here. Davies and Allison say that it plainly means, “make disciples” in this instance, with an emphasis on the entry into discipleship.11 But James Boice claims that matheteusate very literally means “to make one a disciple.” He thinks that Matthew would not use matheteusate and didaskontes in such close context if they meant the same thing.12 Robert Mounce agrees with him, saying the emphasis is on the conversion to becoming a learner.13 It is instructive to note that Jesus follows the going with “baptizing” and “teaching.” The word for teaching here (didaskontes) is a present participle which needs to be understood in the manner that Jesus taught his disciples. The word derives from the root math, which indicates “thought accompanied by endeavor.”14 Etymology thus suggests that a disciple is one who “stands in relation to another as pupil and is instructed by that person.”15
“Teaching” in this verse can be viewed as the process of imparting to people that draws from them obedience. This is consistent with Jesus teaching earlier in the Gospel of Matthew, where, at the conclusion of teaching on the Sermon on the Mount He says:
11 W.D. Davies and Dale C. Allison Jnr, Matthew 8-18: International Critical Commentary, Vol. 2 (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 684.
12 James M. Boice, The Gospel of John: An Expositional Commentary, Vol. 2 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976), 648.
13 Robert H. Mounce, Matthew, New International Biblical Commentary (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1991), 268.
14 W.E. Vine, Vine's Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1996), 221.
15 Horst Balz and Gerhard Schneider, Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), 372. 105
“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.” (Matthew 7:24). In Matthew 28:19, as the two participles follow the imperative, we can define discipleship as entailing both the adherence to faith in Him as indicated by the reference to “baptism,” and living as a follower of Jesus as indicated by the reference to “teaching”: “The concepts ‘baptizing’ and ‘teaching’ are simply two activities, in co-ordination with each other, but both subordinate to ‘make disciples.’ In other words, by means of being baptized and being taught a person becomes a disciple.”16
Discipleship is associated with the activity of being “sent,” for it is in the “Go” that Jesus’ disciples will make other disciples (Matthew 28:19a). The English language only uses a noun for the word “disciples,” but the translation “go” could be adequately translated “going.” The reference to “all nations” has been the subject of scholarly debate as to whether Matthew’s intent here was to refer solely to the Gentiles or to a wider sphere of humanity. I agree with Amy-Jill Levine that “It is better to take the commission here as expanding the ‘mission’.”17 The word “nations” was the Jews’ word for foreigners. This would have presented a paradigm shift for the disciples that they were responsible to take the gospel to all the peoples beyond the boundaries of the chosen race.
16 William Hendriksen, New Testament Commentary: Exposition of the Gospel According to Matthew (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1982), 1000.
17 Amy-Jill Levine refers to Matthew 10:5 that the commission here has pointed out clearly that not to all Jews; it is to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. It goes beyond the framework of this paper to extrapolate on Levine’s argument here or to cover the scholarly debate on this specific issue. She concludes however in her study of that verse: “The ultimate distinction in the gospel remains along the lines of the social axis: judgment is based on faith manifest in action and not on ethnic origin or elite-group affiliation.” Amy-Jill Levine, The Social and Ethnic Dimensions of Matthean Salvation History: “Go Nowhere Among the Gentiles: Matt. 10:5b” (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1988), 222-223. 106
The call of Jesus to mission takes us outside the comfort zone and with a perspective of
God’s love for all humanity.
Discipleship-in-Mission Luke 10:1-12
In Matthew 28:18-20 as we have noted, Jesus commissions the disciples to go and make disciples. Our understanding today of what the disciples were then to do in order to
“make disciples” and “teaching them to obey,” and what we are to do as followers of
Jesus today is often unclear or reduced to a simplistic view of evangelism.18 Luke 10:1-9 presents a picture of what Jesus intended when he said “go out” and “make disciples.” It presents many helpful insights and challenges for what it might mean for the congregation at Heathmont Baptist Church to follow Jesus in the call to go out and make disciples whilst on the journey of “being” disciples. Roxburgh argues that “One of the most critical ways of performing Scripture and entering the world of God’s story today is by discovering how to perform together the world that Luke unfolds to the Gentile
Christians he is addressing in Luke 10.”19
After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. 2 He told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field. 3 Go! I am sending you out like lambs among wolves. 4 Do not take a purse or bag or sandals; and do not greet anyone on the road. 5 “When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ 6 If someone who promotes peace is there, your peace will rest on them; if not, it will return to you.
18 Refer to discussion on the process of conversion later in this chapter.
19 Alan J. Roxburgh, Missional: Joining God in the Neighborhood (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011), 84. 107
7 Stay there, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house. 8 “When you enter a town and are welcomed, eat what is offered to you. 9 Heal the sick who are there and tell them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’
Luke begins in this passage by referring to the seventy disciples who were commissioned to proclaim the kingdom of God (Luke 9:2) which is in the context following “a similar mission of sending the Twelve told in Luke 9:1-6.”20 The first three verses point back to Luke 9:52 where Jesus had sent messengers to a Samaritan village.
But Jesus was not welcomed there, because he was on his way to Jerusalem and Jewish temple and not to Garizim, the temple mount of the Samaritan people. In the preceding verses, in chapter 9 Jesus teaches about discipleship and the costs associated with being a disciple which concludes with verse 62 “Jesus replied, ‘No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the Kingdom of God.’”
The disciples are sent by Jesus “two by two.” The Greek words ανα δυο are literally translated “two by two.” This has a missiological import as this concept of sending pairs of two was not “merely to provide mutual comfort and help, but also to give attested, binding testimony which indicates that their task was a mission, rather than the arranging of hospitality.”21 This concept of pairs however, in addition to providing a double witness, served also to provide “companionship and protection.”22 Mission is the journey of community to community. This is a challenge to both the individualism
20 Robert Stein, Luke: The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1992), 303.
21 Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke: A Commentary on the Greek Text, The New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 1978), 415- 416.
22 Frank E. Gaebelein, ed., The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Matthew, Mark, Luke, Vol. 8 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984), 937. 108
prevalent in the cultural context of Heathmont Baptist Church and to the need oriented pragmatic approach to community influenced by consumer driven lifestyle. The disciples found community in the midst of serving in mission. In The Change of Conversion and the Origin of Christendom, Alan Kreider argues that the early church grew extensively and spontaneously not as a result of the kind of programs that church energies are given to. It grew primarily because of the quality of catechesis in these small, local Christian communities, often in the midst of turmoil and sometimes in the midst of persecution.23
Kreider attributes the reason for such spectacular growth of the early church to three areas: behavior, belonging, and belief. He argues that each of these areas is the result of well-developed catechetical processes. These catechetical methods often took lengthy periods of time, were concerned with the whole life of the individual, and were overseen by sponsors who could testify to the reliability and trustworthiness of the initiate.
The phrases “sent” and “send” in verses 1 and 3 are a valuable contribution. Both words come from the Greek word αποστελλω which means “sent ones.”24 In verse 1 the meaning carries the meaning that the seventy two were “sent with commission, or things intended for someone.”25 Verse 3 uses the Greek word εκβαλη which means “to cast out; to drive out; to send out with the included notion of more or less violence.”26 Although in the English these words appear the same, the Greek gives a connotation that here in this
23 Alan Kreider, The Change of Conversion and the Origin of Christendom (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 1999) xv.
24 Stein, The New American Commentary, 305.
25 Joseph H. Thayer, Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of The New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979), 642.
26 Ibid., 192. 109
context “send” implies a force has to be exerted in order for something to happen. This verb “expresses either a pressing need, or the directness with which (someone is to be) sent to their destination.”27 An urgency is conveyed; a serious intent that requires the person sent to go and deliver the message. In the current environment in Melbourne there is a challenge for the church to feel and be convicted by the urgency of the call to mission by the Lord Jesus.
The aspect of the disciples being sent by Jesus calls for significant reflection regarding the challenge facing the church to exhibit this “sentness” in the practice of discipleship. Stetzer says about our sentness that, “If we, as the church, do not live as sent ones to the people we live among, we are denying that we have come from God. If our identity is found in the God who sends, then ‘missional’ will be more than a buzzword.
Its meaning will remain central in defining who we are as the church.”28 I mentioned elsewhere Greene’s reference to the sacred-secular divide. As Greene highlights, this presents “the biggest challenge facing the Christian church in the 21st century.”29
The sacred-secular divide is described as “the pervasive belief that some parts of our life are not really important to God - work, school, leisure - but anything to do with prayer, church or chapel services, church-based activities and evangelism is.”30 Graham
Buxton, in Celebrating Life: Beyond the Sacred-Secular Divide refers to the dangers of
27 Alfred Plummer, The Gospel According to St. Luke: The International Critical Commentary (New York: Edinburgh, 1951), 272.
28 Ed Stetzer, http://www.edstetzer.com/2008/09/sent-theology.html (accessed October 25, 2012).
29 Mark Greene, The Great Divide, (London: LICC, 2010).
30 Ibid. 110
dualism for the Christian Church identifying five consequences. First, it leads to fragmentation that leads to a lack of concern for what happens outside the church in the world. Second, it can lead to a triumphalism that ignores the reality of what is going on in the world. Third, it results all too often in the mission of the church becoming simply getting as many people as possible into the church, rather than going to places of need in the world. Fourth, it creates a false impression that light is in the church and darkness is in the world. Fifth, it fails to appreciate the inherent goodness in all that God has created.31 Hence, “the church needs to repent of the narrow dualism that avoids any form of genuine contact with the world, a suffocating dualism that treats God’s creation as intrinsically contaminating rather than intrinsically wholesome and good; and needs to repent of a monism that fails to clearly differentiate between God and his world, and between good and evil.”32 The sacred-secular divide limits our sense of where God might work. Yes, God may heal someone in the sanctuary or a home group, but does it occur to us that he might heal on the factory floor or in the offices of an advertising agency? It is with this in mind, that the strategy discussed in this project seeks to pursue a holistic practice of discipleship-in-mission.
As the disciples are not to “take a purse or bag or sandals; and do not greet anyone on the road” (10:5), the call to them is to be “single-minded even to the extent of not becoming involved in time-consuming greetings which were part of Jewish
31 Graham Buxton, Celebrating Life: Beyond the Sacred-Secular Divide (London: Paternoster, 2007), 7.
32 Ibid., 21. 111
tradition.”33 By taking little on the road the disciples “were to be a striking example of faith in God to supply their needs.”34 Leon Morris suggests that this provides a lesson for those in the future who should go “just as they are.”35
The concepts of community and hospitality are highlighted in the direction of
Jesus to the disciples to encounter people in their homes and where the mutual peace was evident to “stay there, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house” (10:7). The traditions of
Jewish hospitality and social engagement when someone visits their home would have created delays from their primary task to proclaim the Kingdom of God in the town. That the disciples would approach a home with nothing in their possession other than peace indicates an underlying emphasis on hospitality. The disciple has to trust in the hospitality of the people. There is an expectation of being welcomed and this provides a sense of being respected by the hosts.
There is a deep value of community inherent in the Gospel and it is demonstrated at the outset by the disciples. This text speaks to us in our day; we are to look for people of peace - those who have influence and are open to our message. We can identify them because they offer us hospitality. Roxburgh suggests more to this,
These followers were sent out on their mission as strangers who would be in need of hospitality from people of the towns and villages. Luke is suggesting that the mission of God moves forward in the world when disciples of Jesus choose to
33 Gaebelein, The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, 937.
34 Marshall, The Gospel of Luke, 418.
35 Leon Morris, Luke: An Introduction and Commentary, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1992), 199. 112
become like strangers in the towns and villages so they will be dependent on the hosts. In such a culture, the village people took in the stranger because they knew that at any time in the future they or their children might become strangers themselves and need to be taken in. There was a deep mutuality in this relationship to the stranger.36
A further aspect to this is the place of meal as the disciples are to stay eating and drinking whatever they are given. The place of meal and hospitality around the table has much to offer as suggested by fellow Melbournian Simon Carey Holt:
It’s good to be reminded that the table is a very ordinary place, a place so routine and everyday it’s easily overlooked as a place of ministry. And this business of hospitality that lies at the heart of Christian mission, it’s a very ordinary thing; it’s not rocket science nor is it terribly glamorous. Yet it is the very ordinariness of the table and of the ministry we exercise there that renders these elements of Christian life so important to the mission of the church … Most of what you do as a community of hospitality will go unnoticed and unrecognized. At base, hospitality is about providing a space for God’s Spirit to move. Setting a table, cooking a meal, washing the dishes is the ministry of facilitation: providing a context in which people feel loved and welcome and where God’s Spirit can be at work in their lives. Hospitality is a very ordinary business, but in its ordinariness is its real worth.37
However the potential to realize this communal aspect in our approach to mission today faces challenges: “In a society that increasingly values individualism where families are sacrificing their common identity in pursuit of individual interests, the common mealtime is disappearing or shared around the television set. Our task is to reinvent the household mealtime as a time to value relationships, to the outsider and reaffirm our need for community.”38
36 Roxburgh, Missional, 124.
37 Tim Chester, A Meal with Jesus: Discovering Grace, Community, and Mission around the Table (Wheaton: Good News Publishers/Crossway Books, 2011), 20.
38 Simon Carey Holt, “Eating family and faith,” in Thoughtful Parenting: A Manual for Wisdom for Home and Family, eds. R. Paul Stevens and Robert J. Banks (Downer Grove, IL: IVP, 2001), 107-112. 113
Discipleship and the Process of Conversion
The issue of how one is “converted” by the Gospel is an important consideration for understanding the aspect of evangelism in the mission of the church to make disciples, and for the role of small groups in this. Chapter 3 referred to the significance of understanding of the Gospel message in regard to salvation, but there is also a need to consider the process involved for conversion. As Richard Peace explains, in the New
Testament the Word epístrophê (conversion) means turning around - that is, reversing direction and going the opposite way.
One turns from the way of sin to the way of Jesus. The other key New Testament term, metanoia (repentance), also conveys the idea of turning, but it focuses on the inner, cognitive decision to make a break with the past must be combined with pistis (faith) in order to bring about epistrophë … Christian conversion is characterized by a decision (repentance) based on understanding (awareness, consciousness, conviction) to turn around from a life of sin (darkness, disobedience, waywardness) to the way of Jesus (light, God, holiness), with a resultant new way of living in the context of the kingdom of God.39
A question we need to ask is “how did Jesus measure conversion?”40 McKnight argues,
Jesus, at a fundamental level, watched the life of those associated with him and by observation could tell if conversion was taking place. “You will know them by their fruits” - those are the words of Jesus (Matt.7:16). It is about behavior; it is about consequences. He simply asked the rich young man to give up his money; he asked the woman caught in adultery to sin no more; he asked Peter, time and again, to follow him. And that is the point: conversion is about following Jesus. It doesn’t matter how or when someone is converted; it matters only that they are converted or are being converted. Jesus measure conversion by behavioral standards – by love, by holiness, by righteousness, and by mercy. It is not about
39 Richard V. Peace, “Conflicting Understandings of Christian Conversion: A Missiological Challenge,” in International Bulletin of Missionary Research 28, no. 1.
40 Scott McKnight, Turning to Jesus: The Sociology of Conversion in the Gospels (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 181. 114
repeating a formula, or belonging to a church, or praying a prayer; it is about following Jesus as the shaping core of one’s identity.41
In What People Are Converted from and What They Are Converted To, George
Hunsberger summarizes Lesslie Newbigin, who saw conversion as a process involving a threefold turning.42 These three dimensions are mental, ethical, and communal.
Conversion means being turned around in order to recognize and participate in the dawning reality of God’s reign. But this inward turning immediately and intrinsically involves both a pattern of conduct and a visible companionship. It involves membership in a community and a decision to act in certain ways.43
In terms of this project, how witness is practiced and how the process of disciple- making is undertaken by the people of Heathmont Baptist Church is of importance. This involves considering what the typical person in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne surrounding Heathmont is turning away from, mentally, ethically, and communally, as he or she turns to Christ. Heathmont is not by western academic standards in a highly academically educated sector of Melbourne. However, there is a “mental turning” required as Newbigin states, that moving from preconceived knowledge of what being a
Christian is to what it means to be a disciple where Jesus is Lord. The shift required reorients the individual from an individualistic mindset to that of community in action. It requires a shift from personal salvation perspective to God’s people in community demonstrating a Christianity that cares for the holistic needs of people.
41 Ibid.
42 George R. Hunsberger, “The Newbigin Gauntlet: Developing a Domestic Missiology for North America,” in Church between Gospel and Culture, ed. Hunsberger and Van Gelder, 11.
43 Lesslie Newbigin, The Finality of Christ (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1969), 96. 115
The second turning that Newbigin points to concerns ethics. As one turns toward following Christ, one’s core foundations are encountered. This journey is one that begins with an initial awareness and progresses through the stages of understanding, evaluation, experimentation, and commitment to the new perspective. It can affect many different areas of people’s lives and does so through the illumination of the Holy Spirit.
Finally, Newbigin suggests that turning toward Christ affects the nature of community. Membership in a community, “The New Testament knows nothing of a relationship with Christ which is purely mental and spiritual, unembodied in any of the structures of human relationship.”44 For the majority of people of Heathmont Baptist
Church the challenge to understand and practice discipleship means a “turning” in the individual’s commitment to church. A shift is required from what is increasingly a sporadic religious attendance and minimal level of contribution with church programs, to being a movement of God’s people acknowledging the reign of God in local neighborhoods through little faith communities that embody the practices and presence of
Christ.
Discipleship and Communitas
As mentioned previously, disciple-making requires more than Christian community. It requires a community that provides regular opportunities for members to experience liminality and communitas. Liminality is a term referring to the change, transitional experience characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy.
Liminality in relationship with Christ is essential for true missional ministry. Frost and
44 Newbigin, The Finality of Christ, 106. 116
Hirsch referring to the change necessary to be disciple making missional people, use this term to describe a threshold experience, “A transitional stage between what was and what is to come.”45 It is a premise of this project that a proper encounter with the strategy to become more intentionally and effectively engaged as disciples in mission, will confront the individual’s personal beliefs and latent core values, and therefore, worldview. This will lead to the experience of liminality. Roxburgh discusses the transition going on within the individual as this encounter takes place. Citing Paul Hiebert, Roxburgh describes the two levels at which all people live: “core traits” (culture) and “surface traits” (society).46 The encounter with a heightened focus on discipleship and mission through pursuing certain practices and adjustments to Life group functions, will eventually create a change in core traits and thereby worldview, leading to the experience of liminality. Roxburgh notes, “Liminality is paradoxical. It places the group in great tension. Even in complex societies the impulses of groups in the liminal state move in two directions at the same time: turning backward to recover lost identity and risking moving forward.”47 Communitas, described above, is the experience common to a whole group as they experience the challenges and experience of liminality together.
The shift to discover a Spirit shaped discipleship requires community to be on the journey of a mission, rather than church centered. For the transition of Heathmont Baptist
45 Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, The Faith of Leap: Embracing a Theology of Risk, Adventure and Courage (Grand Rapids: Baker 2011), 19.
46 Alan J. Roxburgh, The Sky is Falling: Leaders Lost in Translation (Eagle, ID: ACI Publishing, 2005), 133.
47 Ibid., 34.
117
Church to become more missional, discipleship needs to be reoriented from being church centered to being Christ centered; from being internally focused and settled in the comfort of fellowship to undertaking a shared ordeal in missional engagement in local neighborhoods. Life groups at Heathmont Baptist Church can provide these opportunities when framed in this direction. What will be required however is the facilitation of (a) encounter of liminality and (b) created rhythms and practices by which the little faith communities can follow in sharing a common call and ethos. Enabling Life groups to encounter liminality is crucial for as Frost indicates, “you can’t have the marvelous experience of communitas without being in a liminal state.”48 However it by no means an easy task, “Many churches want the exquisite experience of rich, deep relationships, but they aren’t prepared to embrace the challenge of coming out of mainstream society.”49
Hirsch quotes Bill Easum who notes that “Following Jesus into the mission field is either impossible or extremely difficult for the vast majority of congregations in the Western world because of one thing: They have a systems story that will not allow them to take the first step out of the institution into the mission field, even though the mission field is just outside the door of the congregation.”50
Developing rhythms and practices for Life groups to follow enables the story of redemption through Christ to be lived out and passed on in communitas. The role of
48 Frost, Exiles, 111.
49 Ibid.
50 Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, 252. 118
“inner, communal life … matters for mission.”51 And it matters, because as Stanley
Hauerwas observes, “We must be given some exercises appropriate to the kinds of moral growth desired … The Christian life requires the development of certain kinds of habits, but those very habits require us to face ambiguities and conflicts through which our virtues are refined. Therefore, there is every reason to think that Christians have always been prescribing a form of moral development for training in their own community.”52
This inner life can be nurtured in a small group community environment that practices rhythms such as those mentioned in Chapter 3: Communion - the practice of
God’s presence; Relating - the practice of agape, and Engagement - the practice of interacting with the neighborhood.53 Such rhythms and practices can serve to express the reality of God’s reign and shaping the character of the community’s members. A picture of the impact of this combination is seen in the experience of Celtic Christianity during and following St Patrick’s time. A typical Patrician outreach effort to a Celtic tribe would involve the establishing of a monastic community adjacent to the tribal settlement. This
“apostolic” team would then engage the people in conversation and ministry, praying for the sick and possessed, counseling, and mediating conflicts. The teams would tell the
Christian story and answer any questions the people had.54
51 Guder, Missional Church, 128.
52 Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 150.
53 Boren, Missional Small Groups, 62-63.
54 George G. Hunter, The Celtic Way of Evangelism: How Christianity Can Reach the West… Again (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2000), 21.
119
The Function of Leadership to Cultivate Disciples in Mission
The orientation of Heathmont Baptist Church to default to a system focused on church programs and internal socialization has and continues to necessitate leadership that cultivates a culture change. Erwin McManus states effectively the task, “We must focus our attention on creating and shaping the ethos and then on the structures that best nurture and harness its potential. In the end leadership is nothing less than spiritual. And spiritual leaders are essentially cultural architects.”55 Reggie McNeill says, “Church culture has become confused with biblical Christianity”56 and proposes significant questions that “cultural architects” need to get a handle on, which are pertinent for this project,
How do we shift from church growth to kingdom growth? How do we transition the focus from growing the church to transforming the community? How do we transition from ‘churchianity’ to Christianity? The focus traditionally has been on leaders seeking to turn members into ministers - But now a greater challenge looms - how do we turn members into missionaries? How do we set people free from the church, i.e. church activities, busyness, so that there can be authentic engagement with the community?
In light of the contexts described in previous chapters, the task of leadership at
Heathmont Baptist Church has prioritized the facilitation of new meaning so that members of the congregation can interpret the church and the world differently from the way they have done in recent years. Scott Cormode says, “The Pastor seeks to lead change by initiating a legitimization process to help people make sense of the new reality
55 Erwin McManus, An Unstoppable Force: Daring to Become the Church God Had in Mind (Loveland, CO: Group Publishing, 2001), 135.
56 Reggie McNeal, The Present Future: Six Tough Questions for the Church (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003), 2. 120
… Meaning-making leaders give people the vocabulary and theological categories to imagine a different way to interpret the world and to construct a new course of action that flows from the interpretation.”57 Roxburgh describes the cultivation style of leadership that will facilitate mission in a congregation: “Rather than the leader having plans and strategies that the congregation will affirm and follow, cultivation describes the leader as the one who works the soil of the congregation so as to invite and constitute the environment for the people of God to discern what the spirit is doing in, with and among them as a community.”58 Cultivation sets the focus of leadership on the activity and development of God’s people for his purposes, not on self-focused, personal goals and ambitions. The primary task of being a leader is to make sure that “the organization knows itself, that is, the leader’s task is to call people together often, so that everyone gains clarity about what they’re doing, who they’ve become and how they’re changing as they do their work.”59
Leadership will function in terms of equipping so that believers will by the Holy
Spirit use their gifts, energies and talents in the mission Christ has called us to. Ephesians
4:7-16 highlights the equipping role of the teaching and shepherding leadership within a local church. Importantly, the notion of “equipping” needs to be broadened to mean not merely mobilizing people for doing the works of the programs of the church that are self-
57 Scott Cormode, Making Spiritual Sense: Christian Leaders as Spiritual Interpreters (Nashville: Abingdon, 2006), 47, 66.
58 Alan J. Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2006), 28.
59 Margaret Wheatley quoting Mort Meyerson, former chairman of Perot Systems, in Margaret Wheatley, Finding our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time (San Francisco: Berret-Koehler Publishers, 2007), 69. 121
serving, but to mean the releasing and deployment of people doing works of ministry in the mission to people in local neighborhoods and beyond.60 Leadership that equips to this end must employ facilitative means to enable people to both identify their gifts and talents for service, and to identify where God has placed them in a locality. This includes validating the importance of the member’s life and work outside church and identifying where God is at work there and how the member’s gifts and talents can be utilized.
60 The “beyond” refers to the regions and places outside of the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne; the “ends of the world aspect” of the Great commission, cf. Matthew 28:20). 122
PART THREE
STRATEGY
CHAPTER 6
STRATEGIES FOR CULTIVATING DISICPLESHIP-IN-MISSION
Shifting from church growth to Kingdom growth, turning members into missionaries, transitioning the focus from growing the church to transforming the community, these challenges mentioned previously are the crux of the strategy.1 Chapter
6 develops the plan for a discipleship-based community engaging in mission resulting in people’s lives outside the church being transformed by the witness of the Gospel. The four step strategy was: the teaching program to shape a missional understanding amongst the members of the church, the small groups trial of a “missional community” model, the re-training of Life group leaders to lead Life groups as “disciples-in-mission” communities and the development of a evaluative tool to measure the progress of the church towards being disciples-in-mission. The model of Jesus and the twelve, and of the early church functioning as communities of disciples-in-mission provided inspiration for the project strategy.
1 As discussed by McNeal throughout his book, The Present Future. 124
As Bosch contends, it is not possible to talk about the church without an understanding and an expression of mission.2 As the redevelopment of Life groups involves a change of culture and paradigm informed by theological grounding, a critical component of the plan was the reformation of church members’ understanding of discipleship and mission and the function of the church. This, along with the coaching and resourcing of Life group leaders would serve to equip Life group leaders and members of their groups to pursue the vision of the church to be missional and make disciples. Included in the plan was the aim to develop a set of criteria that the church’s leadership body could use to measure progress of the church towards its disciples-in- mission focused vision.
The first goal of the strategy involved a curriculum of teaching for the congregation that explained key components of discipleship in mission. The formation of a missional understanding of church, ministry and our call as Christians is a critical piece for missional behavior. As Stetzer and Eric Geiger state,
Leaders of these simply missional churches understand that a broader vision for discipleship must be cast, a vision that results in obedience, not simply knowledge. By instilling in the hearts and minds of their members a paradigm whereby daily they look and listen for the activity of the Holy Spirit and the voice of God as they move through their day, these ordinary citizens are transformed into missionaries, sent from a Kingdom not of this world into a place that is dry and hungry for redemption on every level.3
This teaching was provided by means of the preaching in Sunday services and accompanying Life group discussion and application material. There was also a
2 Bosch, Transforming Mission, 412, 413.
3 Stetzer and Geiger, Simply Missional, 3.
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curriculum for teaching given at quarterly Heathmont Baptist Church Leadership
Community meetings, where a significant collective of church leaders attended including
Life groups, ministry leaders, ministry staff and Church Council members. The second goal of the strategy was to redevelop the existing Life groups ministry that results in members expressing discipleship through missional engagement. Crucial to this was the goal to develop a strategy for the re-training of Life group leaders to lead Life groups as disciples-in-mission communities. This would be assisted by the pastor for connect and care who was overseer of the Life groups. Ultimately, the plan was that members of
Heathmont Baptist Church would evidence a change of behavior in their expression of
Christian community with a missional posture. This required a fourth goal of developing some tool for evaluation and measurement to ascertain if there is indeed growing engagement by church members as disciples-in-mission, and if there are stories of the transformation of people’s lives outside the church community.
Teaching on Discipleship and Mission
As the congregation regularly comes together for corporate gathering services to receive teaching, encouragement and challenge to live out Christianity, sermon series on discipleship and being missional were presented. Prior to the timeline associated with this strategy, there had been teaching presented on the Kingdom of God. This was done initially in August 2009, with a message launching a seven week period of outreach focus entitled “On a Mission from God: Announcing the Kingdom is here,” while a second longer sixteen week series on “Living Kingdom Values. The Announcing the Kingdom”
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message was based on Luke 4:18-19 and presented the main point that Jesus proclaimed here and elsewhere the good news that the Kingdom of God, life in God’s presence and
God’s power, had now become available to ordinary people.
That too many Christians have substituted another gospel for Jesus’ gospel. The gospel that gets substituted often might be put like this: Here are the minimal entrance requirements for getting into Heaven when you die. Okay, we don’t use those words for it, but in many people’s minds, what they think of when they think of the gospel is, here are the minimal entrance requirements so that you can get into Heaven after you die. Where does Jesus ever say that? He never says that. What does he say? He says, “here’s the good news.” Dallas Willard puts it like this, “All the preliminaries have been taken care of, and the Kingdom of God is now accessible to everyone. Review your plans for living and base your life on this remarkable opportunity.” That’s His good news. That’s Jesus` gospel!4
The “Living Kingdom Values” series which ran over sixteen weeks from October 2009 through to March 2011 was a more comprehensive effort to develop understanding of discipleship and mission through the theological paradigm of the Kingdom of God. This served to provide language and totems to facilitate the congregation’s formal adoption of the Values statement.
As part of the strategy to assist formation of an understanding of discipleship-in- mission, a seven-week sermon series was provided complemented by a program for Life groups encouraging interaction with and application of the teaching to their group life.
The series, titled “Living Like Jesus” was based on the Parables of Jesus from the
Gospels. Seven practices demonstrating a lifestyle of discipleship as Jesus taught the focus of the content: Listening to God in Prayer and Engaging with Scripture - Luke 8:1-
15 Parable of the Sower. Passionate Worship - Luke 18:1-8 Parable of a woman knocking
4 Text of an excerpt from Steve Roggero message to Heathmont Baptist Church “On a Mission from God: Announcing the Kingdom of God is Here” on Aug 1, 2009. 127
and Luke 18:9-14 The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. Grace Filled Loving
- Luke 15:11-32 Parable of the Lost Son. Radical Hospitality - Luke 12:35-44 Parable of the Faithful Servant. Active Mission Engagement - Luke 14:15-23 Parable of the
Banquet. Acts of Service and Compassion - Luke 10:25-37 The Parable of the Good
Samaritan. Sharing Gifts and Blessing - Luke 12:13-21 Parable of the rich fool, Matt
25:14ff Parable of the Talents.
The congregation was encouraged to adopt these in their practice of “faith community” and to facilitate this, the Life groups program sought to engage with the series by having a seven-week special focus in a reduced version of a “40 Days of
Purpose” concept.5 Each week after a Sunday message, Life groups reflected on what they were learning and then planned how as a group they could practice the practice focused on that week. The following week, the Life group would implement their plan to action the discipleship practice.
The ministry staff team collectively planned for 2012 as a year of intentional focus on what it means to be missional. The ministry focus for the year was titled with the theme: “On Your Mark.” With reference to this year being the year of the London
Olympics, the theme denoted that if we are to be truly disciples-in-mission, we need to get “on our marks” to have an understanding of what this actually means. A preaching series would provide some instruction, with topics:(1) On a Mission from God to
5 This is a concept that was created by Saddleback Community Church in the California in the USA, under the leadership of Rick Warren which many churches in Australia adopted. The 40 days program called for the congregation and small groups to commit to a 40 day period (seven Sundays and midweeks) of attending both services and their small group every week for seven weeks running. The program would entail Sunday messages and small groups’ studies and interaction that were integrated. 128
Announce the Kingdom of God,(2) Disciples-in-Mission - Mark 1:14-20, (3) Missional
Communion with God, (4) Missional Relating, and (5) Missional Engagement with our neighborhood - Luke 10:1-9.
The following are the main points of each message in the series: “On a Mission from God to Announce the Kingdom of God” - was a repeat of the message mentioned above and conveys the message on the Kingdom of God Gospel. “Disciples-in-mission” conveys that “Kingdom come” is the inspiration to follow Jesus which requires a radical obedience and abandonment to His mission, such as called from the disciples who dropped their nets to go follow Jesus. The three messages “Missional Communion,”
“Missional Relating” and “Missional Engagement with our neighborhood” were significantly influenced by Scott Boren’s Missional Small Groups, which is considered in greater detail in Chapter 3 of this paper. Briefly, “Missional Communion” is the encountering of God together namely through spiritual practices such as Prayer, Worship,
Listening to God through scripture, and Practicing Jesus meal together. “Missional
Relating” outlines a way of loving one another that stands in contrast to the typical relational patterns of the culture that begins with finding a primary group to be in Christ- centered community. In such a community a safe place is created, conflict is processed healthily and people purpose to build each other up. Through such community, we can realize the intent of Jesus when he said “A new commandment I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:34-35). Elsewhere Boren says, “God is a God of missional being, not of doing. He is a sending God, in that he sent
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himself through the incarnation and through the sending of the Spirit. God is an overflowing fountain of love who sends himself out of his self-gift.”6 “Missional
Engagement with our neighborhood” is a way of being with people in our neighborhoods
(friends, next-door neighbors, family members, co-workers) that displays Christ’s love in tangible ways. In this message drawing from Luke 10:1-9, “Missional Engagement with our neighborhood” means: to go where the people are, to work together in the mission, to build relationships with people in the community, to look for where God is at work in people’s hearts in the community, to practice hospitality and to be prepared to proclaim the Gospel in words.
The theological framing for missional understanding involved some deeper equipping which was the focus of Leadership Community gatherings. Leadership
Community at Heathmont Baptist Church is made up of Life group leaders, volunteer ministry leaders (such as youth leaders, children’s ministry leaders,) ministry staff, administration leaders and Church Council. The Leadership community meets every two to three months and there is a one-day conference each year called “Summit.” Normally, a guest speaker is invited to come and speak on particular subjects. Discussion in groups would follow to enable attendees to interact with and process the input. The following outlines the subjects, speakers and content that was provided to leaders to help form their thinking and application of the strategy: Session 1: “Missional Paradigm Introduction” by
Andrew Menzies, Principal of Sterling Theological College in Melbourne, Victoria. The
6 Scott Boren in an interview with Michael Wallander, Missionalinsuburbia.com, http://missionalinsuburbia.com/interview-with-scott-boren-author-of-missional-small-groupsbecoming-a- community-that-makes-a-difference-in-the-world/2011/03 (accessed September 30, 2012). 130
aim of this session was to introduce to the Leadership Community missional theory and theological framing for church to be in mission. Sessions 2 and 3 (at Leadership
Summit): “Conquering the sacred-secular divide” by Duncan Brown; senior pastor, New
Peninsula Church. This content is particularly instructive for the strategy because it is the sacred-secular divide that describes the problem of church members struggling to be present and active in their local neighborhood.7 Critical to conquering this divide is the need for each member of the body of Christ to view their everyday life occupation and vocations as places where God is at work and vitally important to church ministry. People need to acknowledge their sense of call to these places for, “Where God moves he calls.
The people he calls have influence. The body activates behind called people.”8 This involves for leaders a paradigm shift, especially for clergy. Take, for instance, the regular event where the missionary who is ready to embark on a trip/visit to Asia on mission service gets prayed for and commissioned on the platform at a church service. There are church members sitting in their seats who are serving as teachers in schools, as builders on construction sites, or as managers at a bank. Or there are parents who serve by nurturing their children in their early years as a stay-at-home mom or dad, and they are often in the school grounds for drop offs and pickups or at school working bees. All these are valid cases for being commissioned also. They are no less part of God’s mission service than the overseas missionary who has made it a full time vocation in a foreign land.
7 Refer to previous discussion on Sacred-Secular-Divide, Chapter 5 pages 110,111.
8 Duncan Brown at Heathmont Baptist Church Leadership Community Summit February 18, 2012. 131
At the end of each message at the Leadership Summit, there were “break-out” discussion groups of around six people in each group. These discussion groups worked through questions adapted from a discussion guide prepared by the London Institute for
Contemporary Christianity based on Mark Greene’s essay “The Great Divide.”9
Questions used were,
Summit Session 2 Questions: Lots of areas that have been affected by the sacred- secular divide (SSD), which ones do you think are particularly relevant to you as individuals? The SSD pervades the whole church. Why do you think the SSD is something we need to struggle against? In what ways could you help one another struggle against it? Summit Session 3 Questions: What do you tend to pray about for yourself? What might this reveal about the scope of your concerns? What might it reveal about the areas of life you think God is interested in? What areas are missing? What do you tend to pray about for other people? And who are they? What might this reveal about what you think is important for them, and to God? What might it reveal about who you think is important to God?
The next series of Leadership community formation sessions were as follows: Session 4:
“The calling for all to the mission of God” - Graham Clarke; Senior Pastor, Barrabool
Hills Baptist Church. The purpose of this session was to develop the understanding of what it means to be a “sent” people, and how the call of God helps us to bridge the sacred/secular divide. That wherever we are and whatever we do, we live out our calling as sent ones. Session 5: “Making Disciples.” This session aimed at delving deeper into the nature of what it means to make disciples, and the nature of discipleship and disciple making being inextricably connected to mission.
9 The London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, The Great Divide: Questions for Small Groups (London: The London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, 2010). 132
Teaching on Reaching Out to People in Our Neighborhoods
Whilst it has been acknowledged elsewhere that conversion is part of a process, there is nevertheless a significant need at Heathmont Baptist Church for people to be actively engaging in the process of conversion in other people’s lives. As acknowledged previously, the result of the inward orientation of church life and ministry has resulted in a dearth of activity of people come to faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, especially in the adult sector of the church. The strategy for the next sermon series and Life group discussions was to present teaching on reaching out to, and relating with “not yet Christ followers.” This was undertaken with an adaptation of the “Walk across the Room” series originally created by Bill Hybels from Willow Creek covering the following subjects,
Part 1 “The Single Greatest Gift” This message unpacks the reality that in Christ we have the single greatest gift ultimately we can share with those who do not know Him. But to realize this, we must be prepared to leave our circles of comfort and “walk across the room” to make contact with people we haven’t previously met. Part 2 “Following the Prompting of the Holy Spirit” God is at work all around us and His kingdom has come for all. To reach out to people we need to be sensitive to the leading of His Spirit for promptings and discernment of where he is at work in people’s lives so that we can then respond and offer love, meet the need, and share the hope and the good news. Part 3 “Develop Friendships” In the midst of a society which is increasingly either uninterested or skeptical about devoted Christianity, building trust filled relationships so that we can ultimately speak the truth of Jesus into people’s lives is critical. This takes a proactive loving and care that speaks to people by actions. It takes initiative to be willing to form new relationships and friendships. Part 4 “Discover Stories and Speak the Truth of Jesus” The sharing of faith requires some elements of communication that demonstrated to people that we genuinely care and are interested. This involves discovering people’s stories by learning to listen to their story. Asking questions is pivotal here. Then there may come the opportunity to share some truth of the Gospel. This involves look for where a casual conversation can turn into spiritual conversation and then being willing to start the spiritual conversation.
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Part 5 “Tell your Story” There comes a time and place where the communicating of our faith in an authentic and transparent manner is required as part of the process of evangelism. There is the story we can share that is ‘God’s story’, the Gospel message of Jesus kingdom reign and the call to follow Him and His ways. Then there is ‘Your story’ to tell. This is the testimony each of us can share of the transformation that has occurred, and is occurring in our lives because of His grace and the power of His Holy Spirit.
These messages and Life group discussions were an important contribution to the grasp of mission that includes evangelism as an essential aspect. Merely having Life groups move into proximity of neighborhood does not mean that group members are aware or confident of what they should actually do to build relationships in that context. Nor does it mean that they have grasped how to share the Gospel should the opportunity present.
Life Groups: From Inward to Outward Focus
The refocusing of Life groups to be little faith communities with local neighborhood engagement was a vital aspect of the strategy focus. This strategy embodied the organic journey of discipleship that is, by definition “on mission.” A model based on the three rhythms from Scott Boren’s Missional Small Groups described previously was presented to Life group leaders who were asked to trial this for twelve months. The model involved a monthly cycle of three to four engagements incorporating the three rhythms. Two meetings a month for the group to express devotion to God and love for one another. These related to Missional Community and Missional Relating. This first stage of the groups’ strategy is closest to the normative expression of Life groups at
Heathmont Baptist Church: the focus being on bible study, sharing and prayer. However, the emphasis for these meetings was the intentional purpose of seeking community and
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relationships to flow into missional engagement. The two meetings per month, generally fortnightly and on an evening at a person’s home, were to focus on the encountering of the presence of God and the love of one another in the midst of community.
The second stage involved one occasion per month engaging in common service and witness to a particular neighborhood or network of relationships. This related to
Missional Engagement. The second engagement involved the most challenging of the three strategic steps for it called for the Life groups to move beyond the comfort zone of the lounge-room and each other’s fellowship. By “people group,” what is meant is an identifiable, particular neighborhood or network of relationships. This could include the following: a parents group at a local school, people involved at a local soccer club or cricket club, the lower socio-economic housing commission block of units in a particular street or suburban location, the local hospital, the local high school (for the young people,) the local street and or nearby streets neighborhood, an arts or music collective, the local fire-station, young families in crisis as referred to by a social welfare organization, under-privileged youth and so on.
This step in the three rhythm strategy required considerable preparation, as the
Life group leader needed to facilitate with the group members the process of identifying which particular neighborhood or network of relationships they, as a group, would seek to engage with at least once per month. The rationale behind this strategy step is steeped in theological layers discussed in Chapters 3 to 5, in particular that mission flows from a communitas: as people band together to reach out to acknowledge the reign of the
Kingdom of God in the broader community. The process of facilitating Life group leaders
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to identify and then engage with a particular neighborhood or network of relationships involved Life group leaders doing the following, not necessarily in linear order: (1) Ask the group members ‘where is God at work in your day to day lives? … where might there be opportunity where the Life group could connect with each month? Is there a network of relationships that your members of your group are drawn to? (2) Pray-what is God saying? This could involve a prayer walk, where the groups walk around particular neighborhoods to look and listen where God is at work and where He might be leading them to. Perhaps a person or persons of peace will come into contact, cf. Luke 10. (3)
Have the group look at the resource list handed out to the Life group leader which outlines ideas of particular neighborhood groups. Does one resonate with the group? Can you think of any other options that these ideas are prompting? (4) Decide on one. Choose which particular neighborhood or network of relationships your Life group will seek to engage with.
The process then involved the groups researching which day and time in the month would serve best for each group’s monthly engagement. For example, the local cricket club has Friday evening training for young children. One Life group chooses on a monthly basis to offer to provide a “BBQ sausage sizzle” for the parents standing waiting for their children. There are different tasks for group members to undertake; some group members cook, some help serve the food, others specifically to approach the start of conversation with people, and so on. The Life group is teaming up, serving together whilst parts of the body can express their personality and gifting through the tasks they undertake. It is community, reaching community.
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The third stage involved one evening dinner per month where Life group members gather socially and are encouraged to bring somebody along that they have connected with from the particular neighborhood or network of relationships. This stage related to Missional Relating and Missional Engagement. The third step in the strategy involves creating a relational linkage between the Life group engaging with a neighborhood group and the practice of Christian community through hospitality. The emphasis is on “relationship” as the Life group creates an environment whereby people can be invited to come and share in a meal or a few drinks and connect in a social manner. The concept is that the group would plan to meet together to socialize and relate regardless if anybody has responded from the neighborhood to attend or not. Whether in the context of someone’s home, or in a park around a BBQ or in whatever forum the Life group chooses, the group has an opportunity to, as a small community, express Christian life, love and care in a relaxed social setting. In a society where Christ following devotion is increasingly at the margins, the relational aspect is crucial for the eventual sharing of the Gospel of the Kingdom in words.
Life Group Leaders’ Resourcing
The equipping of the Life group leaders involved their resourcing to comprehend discipleship-in-mission and to assist their facilitation of their group to engage with the three rhythms strategy. The formation of a missiological and ecclesiological framework for discipleship and mission has been discussed above, involving preaching, Life group mid-week studies/reflections and leadership sessions. To assist leaders in the process of
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the strategy, extra Life group leaders meetings were planned. The first meetings involved the explanation of the model with interaction and discussion amongst the leaders. The strategy would be reviewed and there would be opportunity for discussion around the process for implementation. Some resource aids were provided for the Life group leaders including a document outlining numerous ideas of neighborhood people groups and a set of printed monthly calendar sheets. These were to enable the Life group leader to sit with their group and chart out where they would have each engagement so that they could see a monthly pattern to their rhythms. Three further meetings were planned over the ensuing six months to ascertain the progress or not of the Life groups and to discern how the Life groups and their leaders were processing the strategy.
Evaluative Criteria to Gauge the Church’s Progress as Disciples-in-Mission
Inquiry Survey
Following the teaching, preaching and associated Life groups sessions on mission and discipleship, a Life group members and Leaders Inquiry was created. This was a survey of set questions sent to a sample of Life group members and Life group leaders.
The goal of the questionnaire was to inform what understanding members and leaders of groups had of the nature and purpose of the Life group and of the mission of the church.
The analysis would observe what formative impact the teaching and Life groups study program had on shaping this understanding. The questions that were formed for the questionnaire were as follows:
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To the congregational members of Life groups and Life group leaders: 1. When you hear the phrase "be missional" what do you think that means? 2. What do you believe is the purpose of Life groups? 3. When you hear the phrase "make disciples" what do you believe that means? 4. What does it mean to be a Christian “community?” 5. Has your Life group engaged with people from the community beyond HBC? If so, how? If not, why do you think this hasn’t happened? 6. How do you think your group can help you in sharing your faith with others?
Extra question for Life group leaders: 7. What do you see as the major challenges in your Life group becoming more missional? How have you found or how do you think you will find that journey?
Indicators as Evaluative Criteria
In order to work towards the achievement of project strategy goals, and to measure how the church as a whole was journeying to become more effective disciples- in-mission, a further step was required: to develop an objective evaluation tool. Inspired by the journey of a fellow Baptist church in greater Melbourne, I proposed that the leadership team develop a set of “criteria” that would be developed for each component of the vision. The Church Council agreed there was a need for this that would assist in evaluating the church’s vision and ministry direction. Key Indicators would be set for each of “Missional, Caring Community, Making Disciples, and Building the Kingdom of
God.” The Key Indicators would be defined by a set of descriptive statements indicative of behavior and actions expected to be evident amongst church members if the vision and direction was moving in the direction of being realized.
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Following the establishment of a set of indicators for each component of the discipleship and mission focused church vision; a questionnaire would be developed by the ministry staff team to derive data in reference to the indicators. The questionnaire would be distributed to church members. Each of the vision indicators on the questionnaire would have one or more questions that would draw from responders an assessment of their own personal engagement with an aspect pertaining to the indicator.
For example, for an indicator under “Making Disciples” called “People are in active accountable relationships for their spiritual growth,” a question on the questionnaire might read, “I deliberately meet with someone who helps me grow in my faith apart from
Life group meetings.” These questions would not be deductive in nature but inductive.
The premise is have people share insights not of how they think things are, but rather to report on what they themselves have experienced or encountered. The compilation of the answers to these questionnaires would then be translated into statistical data for analysis.
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CHAPTER 7
IMPLEMENTATION AND ASSESSMENT
Chapter 7 documents the implementation of the four phase strategy from Chapter
6: the teaching program to shape a missional understanding amongst the members of the church, the small groups trial of a model as “missional community,” the equipping and resourcing of Life group leaders, and the development of an evaluative tool to measure the progress of the church towards being disciples-in-mission. The strategy intended to recast the priorities of the church with the focus of ministry and church activity on following Jesus in His mission. Also intended was the cultivation of a missional formation that fuelled amongst the members’ imagination for Heathmont Baptist
Church’s future as a church prioritizing discipleship and mission. This chapter presents a documentation of the implementation of the strategy and provides a considered assessment of the project. Future steps are then proposed, including adaptations to the strategy and consideration of new initiatives.
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Documentation of the Teaching Program for Missional Formation
From August 2011 until March 2012 a curriculum of teaching was presented to the Heathmont Baptist Church congregation. In August and September of 2011 the message series “7 Practices for Living like Jesus” was delivered. As outlined in the preceding chapter, seven discipleship practices were presented at both morning and evening congregations and in association with the Sunday teaching program and Life groups participated in their mid-week gatherings. Following each message, the Life groups in their mid-week gatherings discussed how they as a group would “practice the practice” which they were to then action in the following week. A Life group leaders meeting was held in October 2011 to gain feedback. This revealed that some groups had embraced the concept fully and found their group was energized by the creativity of thinking, planning and acting on each practice. Examples of what Life groups had done were shared. One Life group leader shared that in reference to the Discipleship practice
“Passionate Worship” (week 2) - each group member brought a song that leads them to worship and shared why this was the case. Romans 12 was reflected on in reference to
“to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God” (12:1) and throughout that week the group members were asked to reflect on what areas in their lives they needed to surrender. Another Life group leader reported how their group responded to the Practice of “Acts of Service and Compassion” (week 6). The group would engage in three acts of service, (a) Respond to the call for Life groups to clean the church facility every six weeks; (b) Respond to the call by HBC Craft committee to provide food and drinks for the (more than) eighty women who attend the quarterly craft
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nights; (c) “Adopt” and engage with the Telugu Baptist Church in India, and fund a medical clinic, including providing around $800 to fund two doctors and two nurses who treated 300 people at the clinic. The group watched the clinic by Skype as it happened in real time.
Whilst some groups responded with active engagement with the application exercise of “7 Practices,” other groups reported that whilst there was an eager response to the concept, the inconsistency of attendance amongst group members and the time limitation of what group members were prepared to put in beyond attending on the night meant a less-than-desired application. The reflection was that things were discussed more than practiced, symbolizing the generic challenge that faces the church today as discussed previously. In February and March of 2012, a second phase of teaching on “Discipleship- in-Mission” was presented to the congregation. As described in Chapter 6 this phase included the communication to the congregation of the “3 Rhythms” for practicing discipleship in mission through Life groups, as informed by Scott Boren.
Complementing the Sunday message focus was the church wide leadership input provided at Leadership Community meetings from October 2011 through to July 2012.
As planned in the strategy, Andrew Menzies presented in October input on the theology of mission and the mandate of the church. In February, at our Leadership Summit
Conference over two intensive sessions, Duncan Brown presented training on the sacred- secular divide and shared how the church he pastors has been on the journey of validating and mobilizing the engagement of members in the sphere of neighborhood and local community. In May, at Leadership Community, Graham Clarke gave training of the
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calling of God to mission, unpacking that all Christians have the calling as “sent ones.”
Unfortunately the Leadership Community session planned for July on “Making
Disciples” had a last minute cancellation as the speaker was ill. In its place I showed two brief video messages recorded at the “Verge” Missional Conference, one on the subject that discipleship is simply “do as Jesus says,” and the second video message was on the subject of “discipleship as modeling.”
Documentation of the Life Groups as “Missional Communities” Strategy
In October 2011, the first meeting was held with Life group leaders to share the vision for the strategy in 2012 whereby Life groups would trial the model for twelve months. At this meeting the model was described and there was rigorous discussion around the concept. A few leaders reacted with angst over the call for groups to consider how they could engage with their neighborhood. One leader commented “we have just added a couple of people, and we have a full group and it is our priority at the moment to concentrate on getting our group to be comfortable with each other and to grow spiritually ourselves.”1 Another leader commented, “Most of the people in our group are not confident, and they have a lot of issues going on in their own personal or family lives.
I’m struggling to see how we could get our group to focus on people in our wider community.”2 These comments are symptomatic of the obstacles to discipleship and mission in our current context as mentioned in previous chapters. The majority of leaders however were open and willing to consider how their group might be able to engage with
1 From notes taken by Steve Roggero at Life Group leaders meeting October 2011.
2 Ibid. 144
the model presented. One leader went to his group the next evening and reported a very enthusiastic response along with the group listing numerous ideas of where in the neighborhood they might consider engaging. A further meeting was held in December to continue processing the workings of the model, with the view that Life groups would begin the trial in February 2012.3 Further Leaders meetings were held in March and April
2012 to get feedback from leaders and to provide training to assist them in facilitating their Life groups’ implementation of the model. A Life group leaders meeting was held in
August 2012 to evaluate their journey with the trial.
Documentation of the Formation of Evaluative Criteria
In March and April of 2012, the Heathmont Baptist Church Ministry staff team, comprised of five pastors, met to collaborate on developing the set of indicators that could be used an evaluative tool in the future to measure progress of the journey to being disciples-in-mission. These indicators would inform the future development of a congregational questionnaire to derive data for assessment. A two-day retreat was devoted mainly to discussing and shaping a set of behavioral descriptors that would serve as indicators. In April the Church Council met to review these indicators and recommended some minor modifications. This returned to the ministry staff team to finalize, and was subsequently adopted at a Church Council meeting in September 2012.
3 From Dec 25 to beginning of February in Australia, it is the summer school holiday period and church ministries generally go in recess except the weekly corporate gathering and a few activities such as a church family beach day. 145
Assessment of Strategy of Teaching Program for Missional Formation
It is not a simple task to assess what impact the teaching plan and strategy had on church members, and on how Life groups interpreted their role and function. A reason for this is that the strategy is ultimately serving a task of bringing deep cultural change which involved a process longer than the time period in focus with this project. Robert Quinn describes “Deep change” as, “major in scope, discontinuous with the past and generally irreversible.”4 “Deep change,” therefore, does not follow the assumptions or models of ordinary, logical and rational planning. However, in my assessment of the teaching strategy I am looking for early signs and indications. Such early signs of this deep change would be the recognition by leaders and members of the organization of the dissonance between the organization and its context, and that changes are necessary. This lay behind the rationale for a sustained teaching and training campaign to form a missional understanding.
To evaluate the progress of the teaching strategy, at the end of each of these
Leadership Community sessions the gathered leaders gathered in small clusters to discuss responses and what this might mean for their own lives and the life of the groups they lead. These clusters were facilitated by the ministry staff team who reported back that people in the clusters in discussion had actively engaged with the content. The shared view by all cluster facilitators was that the concepts presented at the leadership sessions had served to develop a greater grasp of the concepts around discipleship and mission.
However, it was agreed that it would be a lengthy journey for the culture shift to manifest
4 Robert Quinn, Deep Change: Discovering the Leader Within (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996), 3. 146
itself in sustained lifestyle changes. This was not a surprising reflection, given the premise of a long journey ahead for deep cultural change. The Leadership Summit had a significant impact on the leaders who attended. One outcome of this input was the decision to have increased intentional sharing of faith stories by members of the church in
Sunday services. These faith stories were testimonies of people who were seeing God at work in their everyday world. One noteworthy example of such a faith story was when a woman aged in her late thirties responded to my invitation to share about how she was seeing God at work in her workplace. She worked at a medical center and had committed in the previous three or four years to seeing transformation in her workplace which had been previously in state of dysfunction. The woman disclosed how with the prayer and support of her Life group she had witnessed God bringing breakthroughs in her workplace amongst her co-workers through her relational influence. As she began to conclude, she then she got teary-eyed and shared how for a long time she had lived with guilt that she did not prioritize time doing church activities because she believed God had called her to concentrate on her work place. She said how deeply encouraging it was that she felt validated that what she had been doing was important; that she wasn’t a “second class member” because of her lack of involvement in church ministry programs. This testimony was indicative of the transition that was occurring in church life, and not just amongst members. I was challenged in my own missional paradigm in relation to church ministry. After the Leadership sessions, it dawned on me that whilst I had embraced in my personal journey a commitment to missional thinking and practice, I was caught in the dualism between sacred and secular that was a feature of Christendom. This was
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apparent in the lack of validation I had given to the significance of every member’s engagement in the public sphere. The absence of this was evident in my planning and contribution in Sunday services. Whilst I had facilitated the sharing of “faith stories” of people reaching out in the marketplace, there was an incongruity in the amount of time, promotion and validation given to people serving in their everyday word compared to that given to church program based ministry. I would present a person to be commissioned for overseas mission service, or induct a new ministry staff member for service on the pastoral team of the church. But I had not, for instance, commissioned school teachers, who are sent by Jesus to be missionaries in their school, or the builder who points to the reign of Christ at his or her construction site, or the parent who would be a “sent one” at the schoolyard as they mingle with other parents waiting to collect their children. It was evident that my frame of thinking was still influenced by twenty plus years of being a church pastor chiefly working with church people on church programs.
There was an inconsistent message between the teaching and vision I was espousing and the promotion of what seemed important or significant in church life as symbolized by platform presentations in church services. This insight brought changes. I have subsequently been planning and implementing a redress to bring to the congregation’s attention the significance of the call to each and every one to missional engagement in our day to day lives in the public sphere. An example was the commissioning of all congregational members who are teachers at the beginning of the school year this year.
The impact of the teaching strategy with the congregation can also be derived from the following discussion.
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Assessment of Life Groups Strategy
The evaluation of the Life groups strategy is drawn from feedback that came at
Leaders meetings and from the responses to an Inquiry survey taken by Life group members and Life group leaders. At the Life group leaders meetings it was clear from their feedback that the groups had struggled to get traction with engaging the model of following “3 Rhythms” over a monthly period. Various factors were fed back by the leaders. Some groups still could not move from their perceived priority to focus the group on care and support. It was a consuming work as it was to get the group to support one another to help them face the rigors of day to day life in the world, without adding the element of the group looking to establish activity outside its existing group life. For other leaders, there was genuine regret communicated that they did and do want to work out the model with their groups, but had lost sight of the task in the busyness of life. For yet other leaders, they also communicated the desire to work with the model. However there was a stated lack of clarity of what “neighborhood groups” meant. Three groups had begun the process orientating their group monthly life to the “3 Rhythms” strategy.
The Inquiry survey was a questionnaire sent to a sample group of people who were active in a Life group and to the Life group leaders. The questionnaire was sent to twenty Life group leaders and forty people who were Life group attendees. Out of the twenty Life group leaders, thirteen responded and out of the forty attendees, eight responded. Six questions were sent to all parties, and an extra seventh question was sent to Life group leaders. The first question was, “When you hear the phrase ‘be missional’ what do you think that means?” Responses from the attendees and leaders were similar.
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There was general consensus on a missional understanding as “Active, outward, intentional lifestyle that communicates Christ with unchurched.” This seems to have been impacted by the missional teaching series over the last year. The second question was,
“What do you believe is the purpose of Life groups?” The majority of leaders saw Life group as an “in-house” group for Christian growth and care, not outreach focused. A place where they could encourage others to be missional in their worlds through prayer and teaching. Only one leader saw it largely focused on outreach. All the attendees saw
Life group as purely for Christians, for their equipping, growth and care. The third question was, “When you hear the phrase ‘make disciples’ what do you believe that means?” Half of the leaders defined “make disciples” beginning with the unchurched, leading them to Christ and seeing them become mature and active believers. The other 50 percent of leaders focused on those already in relationship with Christ and their personal growth. For the attendees, the response was largely the same as above, with one person differing by stating “it was all too hard.”
The fourth question was, “What does it mean to be a Christian ‘community’?” A general consensus amongst the leaders was that it means caring, accepting place, where we do life together - the good and the bad. Two people see community as a relevant presence that can impact the worlds we live in. For the attendees, the majority see
“Christian community” as a caring, accepting place, again, where we do life together.
Two people saw it as a platform for mission. The fifth question was, “Has your Life group engaged with building relationships with unchurched people? If so, how? If not, why do you think this hasn’t happened?” From the leaders’ responses, only two groups
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had looked at the group as a whole doing something missional together, identifying a group that they can get around an invest in. Others either have not started or see it as an individual thing, for instance, outside of Life group, people witnessing at work, with their personal friends etc. The attendees’ responses saw most focus on the individual's mission activities, rather than a joined group activity. Busyness of life is a major issue and they didn’t feel they could fit it in. One noted a general lack of concern for the lost through this process in their group and felt that needed to be rekindled. Another felt this concept seemed to be just another “project” and not organic. The sixth question was, “How do you think your group can help you in sharing your faith with others?” For the leaders, the most common answers were prayer and accountability/encouragement and teaching. For the attendees, answers were similar to the leaders’ answers with the most common answers being: prayer and accountability/encouragement and teaching.
The seventh question was put only to the Life group leaders: “What do you see as the major challenges in becoming more missional? How have you found, or how do you think you will find that journey with your group as a Life group leader?” Some leaders were still trying to identify an activity/people group that whole group can connect with and not seeing it as another project, rather than something organic. Others were trying to confront fear issues within the group, and for some groups, shifting from an inward mindset to a missional mindset was a challenge. Busyness of life was a common factor repeatedly mentioned in their answers.
The reflection on the feedback from leaders’ meetings and the Inquiry Survey has shown that there is an improved comprehension of discipleship and mission and the need
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for engagement with neighborhoods. However, this missional formation is still in an early stage of development. The desire for ministry to be outwardly focused is apparent and there is enthusiasm about facing the missional challenge. However, for the majority, there is a clear disconnect between how they experience, interpret and value Christian community and the place of mission in this. Whilst the concept of communitas has been warmly received when described and discussed at leaders’ meetings, this has not grounded itself in the thinking or practice of Life groups. To date we have not seen groups and Life group leaders implement the “3 Rhythm” approach within groups in respect to the third Rhythm of Missional Engagement. A difficulty lay in the conceptualization of Life groups as communities in mission. The aspect of identifying a people group in the neighborhood proved to be a major obstacle. Despite the communication at leaders meeting briefings emphasizing that neighborhood groups could be ideally located within the sphere of group members’ everyday lives, the common feedback is that it has been interpreted as programmatic: a “mission program,” rather than organically working with what God is already doing in our midst, and in the midst of people's lives. Most groups have made the comment that individuals are already actively doing mission in their worlds, their work, their schools, etc. and they are being asked to give extra time to a new project.
There is an apparent incongruence at this point regarding the theological grasp of mission as witnessing community. The stated stressors of being time poor, of being “too busy” continue to align people to a more individualistic interpretation of mission. It has also become evident during the process that Life groups are on the whole struggling to
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experience consistent, authentic, transformational “community” as ought to be case based on an understanding of biblical foundations, as discussed elsewhere. The lack of continuity through sporadic attendance and cancelled Life group meetings due to multiple apologies has heightened the challenge. The strategy around Life groups, whilst encouraging people to think about being intentionally missional and getting groups to discuss, pray, about mission, has not been on the whole effective in its implementation of people in their Life groups practically outworking the doing together of neighborhood engagement. As people who make up Life groups come together from different journeys, different stages of life and different interests trying to get people to agree on a people group to give themselves has been perceived as impractical.
A lesson from the strategy process undertaken was the failure to provide adequate accountability and coaching to the Life group leaders as they undertook the task. This was partially affected by a change of pastoral leadership over Life groups just as the strategy was commencing. There was time to redress this somewhat, however both connect and care pastor and myself failed to provide the close support and accountability that the strategy required. Doug Paul, Director of Content and Communications for
Missional Training network 3DM, writes that one of the reasons Missional communities
(MCs) fail is because leaders aren't held accountable, “MCs are built on the principle of
Low Control/High Accountability … If your leaders aren't willing to be held accountable, this is a spiritual problem (i.e. also a discipleship issue) and it WILL come back to bite
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you.”5 From the supervising/coaching leader there needs to be clarity about what accountability looks like, what those rhythms look like, what the expectations are, and it is important to make sure there is follow through on these expectations as the person holding them accountable. This is instructive to the analysis.
There is however a broader theological reflection to be considered from the resulting lack of Life group participation in mission as a community to a particular network of relationships or local neighborhood. On the one hand, there is a continuing need for the cultivation of a grasp of discipleship that demonstrates a “Life together” sense of community that incarnates into the neighborhood or network of relationships in the Christ-follower’s life. This is a challenge that must counter the phenomenon Robert
Bellah calls “ontological individualism.”6 Bellah describes this as the belief that an individual is his own source of meaning. On the other hand, there is also a need for the validation of individual missional expression to be as legitimate an expression of ecclesiological mission as is communal expression. It is acknowledged that just as we can participate in Jesus’ work in the world collectively as little communities of faith (Life groups,) so can we participate in Jesus’ work in the world as individuals-energized, encouraged and equipped by the faith community we belong to.
5 Doug Paul, “Top 10 Reasons Missional Communities Fail,” http://dougpaulblog .com/2011/05/top-10-reasons-missional-communities-fail-reasons-1-5/ (accessed October 27, 2012).
6 Robert N. Bellah, Richard Marsden, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (London: University of California Press, 2007), 334. 154
Ray Anderson emphasizes the mission of the church as “Kingdom living” not as
“Kingdom building.”7 The Kingdom of God is a broad concept that encompasses the culture and the workplace. The church exists to “outsource” the individual Christian’s
“need for communion with other believers and our instruction and guidance from the
Word of God, and recharge our spiritual batteries for our daily life” in what Anderson calls the “secular sacrament” of the workplace.8 In this sense regarding mission, “Its object is always the world … men and women in their multiple life situations … In reference to this witnessing action saturated and led by the sovereign, redemptive action of the Holy Spirit … Missiology arises as part of a witnessing engagement to the gospel in the multiple situations of life.”9 The conversation around the sacred-secular divide referred to in earlier chapters becomes a key aspect of the narrative going forward.
Working towards the validation of each congregational member to view their everyday life occupation and vocations as places where God is at work, the Church body can actively get behind each individual to provide support and encouragement. In this sense, there needs application of a turning from the dualism that has divided church from neighborhood and hence hindered discipleship-in-mission.
Pertinent to this is an appreciation of the nature of being human as being in a
“relatedness,” which gives foundation to missio dei. Following on from Karl Barth’s
7 Ray S. Anderson, An Emergent Theology for Emerging Churches (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2006), 99.
8 Ibid., 115,116.
9 Orlando Costas, Global Dictionary of Theology: A Resource for the Worldwide Church, eds. William A. Dyrness, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, and Juan F. Martinez (Downers Grove, IL: InterVasity, 2008), 556. 155
contention that “being” is being-in-relation, being-with, Douglas John Hall says, “Simply in our being there we are being-in-relationship; our sheer existing points to beyond itself.
We are creatures whose being implies relatedness … To be, to be in-the-world, is to be with.”10 Therefore the action of “being” as the people of God can result in the expression of God’s Spirit at work in the world,
The wisdom of Christianity is refrained towards the discernment of God’s particular and universal presence in the world, to which human action should reorientate itself in order to recover the fullness of God’s blessing of creatureliness in fellowship. The actions of the Spirit, co-working with the Word, relate the movements of encounter through the spatio-temporal field of sociality. Through practices towards fellowship, which are the gift of the Spirit, and the enjoyment of fellowship, which is the life of the Spirit, the presence of the Spirit is to be understood.11
Through the living out of being with one another as God’s people, this presence of the
Spirit as expressed through sharing, hospitality, caring, bearing one another’s burdens and so on, can produce the joy and hope that bears witness to God’s life and activity. As
Hall puts it: “To be imago Dei does not mean to have something but to be and do something: to image God.”12
The implication for Life groups as with all congregational ministry, reinforces the acknowledgment made previously that mission finds its place within the clear relational paradigm as exemplified by God as Trinity, but points to the ontological effect of this
10 Douglas John Hall, Imaging God: Dominion as Stewardship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 119.
11 Douglas John Hall, The Steward: A Biblical Symbol Comes of Age (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, and New York: Friendship Press, 1990), 202.
12 Hall, Imaging God, 98. 156
paradigm in the context of mission.13 In recognition of the complexity of demands before people in this present age, a significant platform for mission is the experience of “being” the people of God so that individuals may then be empowered to participate with what
Christ is doing in their everyday worlds. As John Taylor states in The Go-Between God,
“The gift of the Holy Spirit in the fellowship of the church first enables Christians to be, and only as a consequence of that sends them to do and to speak.”14 As referred to earlier, the small group acts as a being group for the nurture of persons but an acting group for the benefit of creation.15 The church bears witness by being a foretaste of God’s completed reconciliation. As a loving community the church points to the love of God,
The Church is both a means and an end, because it is a foretaste. It is the community of the Holy Spirit who is the earnest of our inheritance. The Church can only witness to that inheritance because her life is a real foretaste of it, a real participation in the life of God Himself. Thus worship and fellowship, offering up praise and adoration to God, receiving His grace, rejoicing in Him, sharing with one another the fruits of the Spirit, and building up one another in love are all essential to the life of the Church. Precisely because the Church is here and now a real foretaste of heaven, she can be the witness and instrument of the kingdom of heaven. It is precisely because she is not merely instrumental that she can be instrumental.16
Being the good news therefore enables the church to bring the good news.
The challenge this project sought to tackle is that of living and being the good news beyond inwardly focused Christian community. Critiquing earlier missio Dei theology, John Flett argues, “The Christian community … is, as such, a missionary
13 Discussion on Trinity in relationship to community – see Chapter 3 Pages 62-63.
14 John Taylor, The Go-Between God, 2nd ed. (London: SCM Press, 2010), 134.
15 Icenogle, Biblical Foundations for Small Group Ministry, 23.
16 Lesslie Newbigin, The Household of God (London: SCM, 1953), 147-148. 157
community, or she is not a community that lives in fellowship with the triune God as he lives his own proper life.”17 Flett contends that while missio Dei rightly refers to the call of the church “to ‘echo’ in time the communion that is God’s life in eternity, missio Dei rightly indicates is that there isn’t just communion but also sending in the Triune life.”18
However, “sending” without “communion” is also a shallow reflection of the perichoretic work of God, for missio Dei reminds us that conversion “applies to the whole of life, including social and cultural institutions.”19 Hall proposes, “There is … a fluidity, a back- and-forthness … between the Christian community and the surrounding culture. The lines of distinction are not drawn indelibly between the avowedly sacred and the apparently secular.”20 One of the conclusions reached from assessment of this project, particularly in reference to Life groups, is the need to cultivate an integrative approach to mission.
Through the activity of “being” the people of God, members can respond with their participation in God’s mission.
This leads to consideration of the pastoral nature of small groups. By their very existence, Life groups at Heathmont Baptist Church are the primary avenue by which members of the groups exhibit Christian care for one another. In the midst of
17 John G. Flett, The Witness of God: The Trinity, Missio Dei, Karl Barth, and the Nature of Christian Community (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 34.
18 Ibid., 27.
19 Ibid., 51.
20 Douglas John Hall, “Finding Our Way into the Future,” http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t &rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=6&ved=0CEYQFjAF&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ptsem.edu%2 FuploadedFiles%2FSchool_of_Christian_Vocation_and_Mission%2FInstitute_for_Youth_Ministry%2FPri nceton_Lectures%2FHallFinding.pdf&ei=mbbWULKCO4aiQfn1YGQCg&usg=AFQjCNEpIfdaUaAtoStp 8v-HQpFNAfVOYw&bvm=bv.1355534169,daGc (accessed December 23, 2012), 27. 158
discontinuous change and the widespread dispersiveness of congregational members, the small group serves to bring a necessary and desired sense of relational and caring community which is a key aspect of their purpose as referred to in Chapters 3 and 4.
Mallison observes, “The devotional experience and the social concern of the group, far from being in conflict, actually require each other in order to produce a healthy, balanced fellowship.”21 Reflection on the outcomes of this project has led to acknowledgment of the need to further validate the pastoral nature of the Life group in the context of a missional, disciple-making strategy. In the rich experience of being a Holy Spirit filled caring, sharing, gift expressing community, the being of good news can then lead to the bringing of good news; the people of God function as an extension of Christ acting as a sign of the reign of God. As Jimmy Dorrel puts it, “There is a fountain flowing through the life of God’s church that can transform all creation.”22 In this regard the Life groups focus is orientated to experience a vibrant inward journey that is integrated with an outward, “Biblical principles such as confession, forgiveness, reconciliation, encouragement and admonishment connect with the local community where injustice and brokenness rule.”23
It should also be stated that assessment of this project does not preclude that Life groups could effectively engage as a collective with a particular neighborhood or network of relationships, particularly if the group owns the task. A pertinent question here is
21 Mallison, The Small Group Leader, 12.
22 Jimmy Dorrell, Dead Church Walking: Giving Life to the Church That Is Dying to Survive (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011), 60.
23 Ibid. 159
whether there exists some sort of sociological limitation that prevents small groups from engaging relationally with a particular neighborhood or network of relationships. Joseph
Myers in his book, The Search to Belong identifies four distinct spheres of social interaction common to all humans around the world, noting that emotional health only comes when we have significant connections in all four spaces.24 “Public space” is characterized by an interpersonal distance of twelve feet or more and could be represented by people milling around a mall or enjoying a concert together.25 “Social space” is characterized by physical distances of four to twelve feet, group sizes between twenty and fifty, and involves a greater level of personal interaction. In the social space, conversation is expected, and collaboration toward a common goal is welcomed. This is the realm of “neighbor relationships.”26 Lives intersect regularly, but do not go particularly deep. One of the primary benefits of the social space is to provide a selection of relationships that have the potential to become closer, to move into the deeper personal space. In small churches, the entire congregation could fit into this social space.
“Personal space” is the next category, which is characterized as friendships within proximity of eighteen inches to four feet. Personal space is where small groups, cell groups, or Life groups seek to function in most churches. “Personal space is where we connect through sharing private - although not ‘naked’ - experiences, feelings, and
24 Joseph R Myers, The Search to Belong: Rethinking Intimacy, Community and Small groups (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003), 20, 41.
25 Ibid., 20.
26 Ibid., 46.
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thoughts.”27 “Intimate space” is characterized by distances of eighteen inches or less. This sphere contains only a small number of people who know each other intimately.
“Relational nakedness” is key in this space, choosing not to hide from each other. Myers argues that churches tend to have made relational intimacy their primary goal, essentially devaluing all other spheres of social belonging.28 The Life groups emphasis at Heathmont
Baptist Church seeking relational intimacy, may by its inherent nature be an obstacle to the groups comprehending and engaging with mission beyond their group’s life.
Mike Breen and Alex Absolom have provided a model of “missional communities” that bases its methodology not only on a missiological and ecclesiological framework, but also on the sociological aspect of social space. Breen and Absalom define missional communities as “[a] group of anything from twenty to more than fifty people who are united, through Christian community, around a common service and witness to a particular neighborhood or network of relationships.”29 Breen draws on the experience with an Anglican church in Sheffield, UK, in the 1990s where he developed the concept of mid-size congregational communities doing mission. He realized that most churches know how to pull off the large celebration services, and many churches do an admirable job with cell groups, but nobody seemed to be focusing on the mid-sized group. Upon evaluating the cells of his church and others, he realized that even though some of them wanted to have a missional outward focus, they were “small enough to care, but not big
27 Ibid., 47.
28 Ibid., 51.
29 Mike Breen and Alex Absalom, Launching Missional Communities: A Field Guide (Pawleys Island, SC: Sheriar Press, 2010), 18.
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enough to dare.”30 The cells were effectively caring for and ministering to those within the small group, but the social dynamics of size and the limitations of resources and skills made it difficult for the cells to reach out in ministry to the world.
This analysis describes the difficulty we have experienced at Heathmont Baptist
Church. Breen decided to group individual cells together in to what he first referred to as
“clusters,” which would consist of between twenty to forty people.31 Notably, Breen and
Absalom draw on the factor of social dynamics of size being a significant factor for the make-up, with a medium size of twenty to forty people. Breen recognized that his church and others were working hard to produce intimate discipling relationships, close personal relationships in cell groups, and anonymous but significant belonging in a large celebration service, but they were missing a vehicle for belonging on the social level of twenty to fifty people.32 This missing social space was causing a disconnection between the public and personal relational spheres of his people. Breen also recognized that this social space may be the best relational sphere for strategically reaching out to groups of people. These insights were influenced by research done in the 1960s by Edward Hall that showed the different “spaces” that people inhabit: Public Space (seventy five people or more,) Social Space (20-70 people,) Personal Space (6-12 people,) and Intimate Space
(1-2 people) and how we group ourselves in those different spaces. The implication from the research was that people derive their primary identity from the Social Space … the
30 Ibid., 16.
31 Breen and Absalom, Launching Missional Communities, 17.
32 Ibid., 44.
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group of twenty to seventy people. People will naturally gravitate towards the Social
Space where there is the big enough to dare environment. The combining of small groups into medium size communities might provide a more effective social space to engage with a particular neighborhood or network of relationships.
Assessment of Strategy to Development of Evaluative Criteria
The exercise in facilitating Heathmont Baptist Church’s leadership proved fruitful and clarifying. The Ministry staff team was enthused and engaged in the process of developing the indicators. The outcome was a unified ownership across ministry staff and
Church Council bodies with a set of key indicators to be used for evaluation of how the church is progressing towards the vision.33 As hoped for, these indicators provide descriptive language. For example, for “Caring Community” an indicator reads: “People are being followed up when they are absent.” For “Missional” an indicator is, “People are capable of articulating the message of the Gospel.”
This list of indicators has created a grid for strategic alignment. It clarifies what the outcomes across all ministries might look like in following the missional vision, under the leading and power of God’s Spirit. The process of forming these criteria provided definition as leadership came to a collaborative clarity as to what was meant in practical terms when using the terms “missional” and “making disciples.” The next step, being the development of a questionnaire that the members of the congregation will be invited to complete, is in the midst of being taken.
33 Refer to Appendix D for the list of Indicators. 163
Future Steps Arising from Project Assessment
Adaptive Change Process
This project has focused on the strategy to bridge the gap between the intellectual and emotional assent to want to be missional and the absence of such engagement in people’s everyday lives. Whilst the strategy, along with earlier change process steps discussed in Chapter 2 has evidenced an encouraging growth in the conceptual understanding of “disciple-making” and being “missional,” further steps need to be taken to facilitate a greater “actual” engagement by people in their everyday lives. Whilst the change process through this project has drawn a collective “aspirational” commitment from the congregation, except in the case of a section of leaders and congregational members, for a large contingent of people there is still a significant gap between the aspirational and the “actual.” Steps need to be taken to help bridge the gap between mental assent and behavioral action. A future step for consideration is to employ a tool in the ongoing change process that, through inductive means, facilitates greater “actual” engagement by congregational members to discipleship-in-mission. Primarily, the focus would be on cultivating the response of congregational members to actively seek to participate with God’s Kingdom work in their everyday lives. One change process tool might be Roxburgh’s four step process from his book Missional Map Making,
1. Assess how the environment has changed in your context (how has the context changed and how are people responding to it?) 2. Focus on redeveloping a core identity (how can we cultivate environments that re-create a core identity by re-forming the Christian life around the core of the Christian narrative and what would that look like in daily practice?) 3. Create a parallel culture (how can we introduce practices and habits that shape
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a common life to a small group that will change the organizational culture from the bottom up and the inside out?) 4. Form partnerships with the surrounding neighborhoods and communities (by helping the small group learn to discern and identify where God is working in their neighborhoods, how can we help connect conversations and invite experiments in what it means to live as God's people in today's world?)34
In regards to “surrounding neighborhoods and communities” referred to in step 4, I would extend the definition to have a broader scope than geographical. It would incorporate the aspect of groups or communities that gather around common interest or recreational hobbies, for example: artists, cricket or football players and teachers. In light of the positive and negative outcomes of this project, this four step strategy and its inductive process would enable a recalibration of the work done so far and facilitate individual ownership of what mission entails in their everyday lives. As Roxburgh states, “It will be among the ordinary people of God that the ability to discern what needs to take place in their neighborhoods and communities must emerge. The new maps come from among the people.”35
Further Resourcing Tools
Given the commitment to encourage each congregational member to be actively engaged in the work of God in their everyday life occupation and vocations, it is necessary to consider how church leadership can assist this through resourcing and training. One example is the re-writing of a tool that has previously been used to mobilize people into church program based ministry. “Wired” is a course that has had wide
34 Alan Roxburgh, Missional Map-Making: Skills for Leading in Times of Transitions (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2010), 127ff, 134ff, 143ff, 164ff.
35 Ibid., 137. 165
participation by church members. Through a teaching curriculum and inventories that individuals take for self-discovery, the focus has been on the identification of gifts, passion and abilities to facilitate their engagement with church based ministry. A revision would broaden the focus to the identification of gifts, passion and abilities to facilitate participation with God’s work in their everyday lives.
To this end, consideration will be given to other tools that could be used to facilitate people’s engagement. One such tool to be considered is to invite group study of the book Monday Morning Atheist. Authors Doug Spada and Dave Scott tackle the challenge of living out Christian faith in the workplace. Through primary research the authors contend that many Christians, though believing in God, at certain times in their work lives function just like atheists, “When we approach our work week without including God, we have to be honest: We are practicing Monday morning atheism.”36 The authors seek to help workers to live in the light in their work lives. This book also comes with a five-week application exercise for small groups and online resources are available.
Thought will be given to what other practical measures could be employed to encourage church members to be partner with God’s work in their everyday lives
Adaptations of the “3 Rhythms” Strategy
As mentioned above the recognition of the nature of Life groups and the validation of individuals living out the kingdom in their everyday worlds does not preclude that for some Life groups, a communal engagement in mission is a valid
36 Doug Spada and Dave Scott, Monday Morning Atheist: Why We Switch God Off at Work and How You Fix It (Alpharetta, GA: Work-Life Press, 2012), 29. 166
expression. Some Life groups have indicated a willingness and enthusiasm about engaging through the “3 Rhythms” strategy. This will require time for the model to take root, however some adaptations need to be considered to enable greater effectiveness. A variation under consideration involves groups being asked to consider the alternative of engaging with a neighborhood group in pairs or more, rather than it having to be an entire group engagement. All members would be encouraged to engage in their neighborhood network, however divided into smaller units, of friendship clusters as is organically applicable.
Another adaptation under consideration is to have participating Life groups meet together two nights a month and on a third night of the month encouraging members to do something with people in their unchurched world. The focus of each Life group when they meet on the two nights would be, in addition to Christian growth and nurture, to provide support and encouragement about the third night. This would be achieved through praying for one another and the people in their neighborhoods and to then discuss and debrief how those nights went, what happens next and so on. Members in a group who naturally connect more easily with people in their neighborhood than others in the group can exercise the role of encouraging others to accompany them. An advantage of this adaptation is that it provides a more organic approach in the sense that it flows from already emerging relationships. The disadvantage is the prescient danger of group members staying within a comfort zone of their familiar world. This could result in the omission of mission to less comfortable places and people where the justice of God, which is part of the holistic gospel, is desperately needed.
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A further adaptation under consideration is collaborative initiatives between Life groups. Following on from the question around whether small groups can effectively be capable of engaging in mission in the smaller size they have, and with insights regarding the potential of social spaces, consideration is being given to develop a combined group, medium-sized missional community. This would be a pilot experiment of having between one to three Life groups join together to create a medium size group with the aim of engaging with a particular neighborhood or network of relationships.
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SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
As I begin writing the conclusion to this study, I have returned home from a
Sunday service where a young man was baptized, having declared his faith in Christ and willingness to serve Him. It is one of only a few baptisms that we have encountered at
Heathmont Baptist Church in this last year. This baptism in essence symbolizes the hope and inspiration behind the call to mission for Christ’s body, and the stark reminder of the urgency to rediscover disciple-making steeped in mission. There is a mass of people in the region where the church is situated that have need for the Gospel that liberates, provides restoration, healing and purpose. The fact that Heathmont Baptist Church has attracted a substantial increase in the composition of younger people and families in the last few years has placed the church in a healthy position to have an ongoing future.
However the real value of such a future will be measured not by the numbers of people who have joined as Christians from other churches, but by the demonstrable engagement of the church with the God-given agenda as indicated in Matthew 28:19, 20 to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”
This project has sought to highlight that the nature of the purpose and the church is that of following Jesus in His mission, by the enabling of His Spirit. There is interconnectedness between theology, ecclesiology and missiology as scripture shapes our understanding of missio Dei. In responding to Father God, following Christ and being enabled by the Holy Spirit, we become community as members of His Body and whilst
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growing into maturity, participate in his mission to reach our world. Our participation is not an individualistic effort, but like the Trinity, an action of community. This Project also sought to emphasize that the goal of Christian community is not principally for our own personal benefit. The goal of Christian community is that in response to God’s word and in relationship with Him, the “Christ-ones” commune and bear witness to the Gospel and the reality of God’s presence through their visible fellowship.
This study has focused on the church understanding her Kingdom of God purpose and calling, recognizing that God’s reign and rule exists over all the affairs of the world and across all spheres of society, and not merely within the four walls of the church building where God’s faithful gather. At Heathmont Baptist Church, the recognition of this calling to mission has been affirmed through the repositioning of the church in vision direction, leadership roles and structure. The church is purposefully and intentionally on the journey of transition to seek to become a missional, disciple-making church. As a governing body, the Church Council is focused on the progress of the church’s mission and vision. There is now a set of indicators to bring greater clarity and accountability in the work of the mission. The ministry staff team also is united and energized in the task to continue making adaptations necessary for more effective engagement. The membership has only just recently affirmed the church direction with a resounding applause at the Annual General Meeting on October 21, 2012.
In the time-frame around this project, steps have been taken by members of the church towards the deep change required for inward church focus to outward. The formation of a missional understanding of the nature and purpose of church is growing
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and is demonstrated by ministry areas reimagining programs with mission as the goal, along with the expansion and multiplication of some of our more mission focused ministry initiatives. Whist Life groups on the whole struggled to engage the “3 Rhythm” monthly strategy to link group fellowship with God and each other with a particular neighborhood or network of people, progress is visible regarding the broader objective of missional engagement by members. The agenda has changed for groups. Groups are now interacting and wrestling with the question of how we can do mission, whereas previously the focus and energy was taken up mainly with inward fellowship matters or an inadequate concept of mission, such as expressed through sending of an offering to an overseas missionary. A group of Life groups have committed to working on the “3
Rhythm” monthly strategy in the upcoming year, and leaders have committed to an accountability huddle for regular coaching and support.
In the course of this project clarity has emerged regarding the conceptualization of mission as individuals living out the Kingdom of God in their everyday lives participating with the work He is doing. The steps in the strategy aimed to achieve missional formation saw the introduction of the sacred-secular divide conversation. This in turn influenced the development of key indicators as an evaluative tool for the desired outcomes around discipleship-in-mission. However, the project strategy outcomes have highlighted the work that still has to be done in confronting the dualism that has been prevalent in the western church and at Heathmont Baptist Church which has limited the activity of mission as “sentness” in the everyday lives of people.
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When this project started I had my doubts that Life groups at the church could achieve the task of being “missional communities.” The experience of a few decades in church ministry and seeing little activity in this manner by small groups gave cause for doubt. However I took to the task with energy and conviction. The “3 Rhythm” strategy did incorporate an integrated focus on group relationship with God and one another as well as the project of identifying and relating to a particular network or neighborhood in the local community. However, in light of the outcomes discussed in the previous chapter, I have cause to not under-estimate the natural orientation of groups towards the spiritual and relational needs of members. With regard to the goal of making disciples-in- mission, there is clear value in the recognition of the pastoral role Life groups can play in the lives of individuals to provide nurture and encouragement so that people can be energized to live out their witness in their walks of life. With a more developed missional formation in progress and with the outworking of future strategy steps already outlined, it hoped that this will facilitate a greater realization of a church that witnesses to the presence of Jesus the King. Where the people of God live as “salt” and “light” in their everyday lives embodying a deep sense of “being” as well as “doing” church. David
Fairchild sums up:
To have a gospel-initiative, it must be placed in the context of a gospel community. The world will know we are Christians not by our disconnected, loose affiliations for one another but for our love for one another in a radical gospel community. Without the church, the preview of the Kingdom and the witness of the truth claims of the gospel are lost.1
1 David Fairchild, “New Forms of Doing Church,” comment section of drewgoodmanson.com; http://www.goodmanson.com/church/new-forms-of-doing-church/ (accessed October 30, 2012). 172
APPENDIX A List of current ministries Heathmont Baptist Church - 2012
Administration Angel’s café Baptist Women’s Fellowship Blessed Feet Walkers Creative Moments Creative Ministry Productions Cricket Club Crossroads Dad’s army (property upkeep and maintenance) Friendship Club Finance Global Transform (Missions) Glue (Youth Ministry) Heathmont Baptist Cricket Club HICH (Heathmont Inter Church Help) Hertime (Women’s Ministry) Impact (Men’s Ministry) Junior Geriatricks Kidzone Kidz Konnect Life groups (Small Group Ministry) Mainly Music Playgroups (7 in operation) Restore Restoration Prayer Healing Ministry Soccer Club (Eastern United) Stewards Welcome Worship ministry Young Adults Ministry
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APPENDIX B
HEATHMONT BAPTIST CHURCH MISSION, VISION & VALUES STATEMENTS Mission Statement: Announcing the Kingdom of God, Seeing Lives Transformed Mission Description: Jesus’ gospel was the availability of the good news Kingdom of God. Jesus’ purpose was to manifest the reality of that Kingdom through His life, death, and resurrection and through His teachings and actions. The kingdom of God will only be fully known beyond this life, but through Jesus Christ it is available to be known in part now. The result is life transformation. The kingdom of God is whenever and wherever “up there comes down here", in me, my church, and my world. As followers of Jesus we respond to the Holy Spirit’s activity pointing to God’s kingdom’s life through our words and actions. Vision Statement: “A Missional, Caring Community, Making Disciples and Building the Kingdom of God in Eastern Melbourne and Beyond.” Vision description: Missional: Every member a missionary! Wherever we live, work and play, every member be an ‘announcing the kingdom’ person; a church engaged in the world we live in, sharing the good news of Jesus in word, action and the presence of God. Caring Community: Through the engine room of growing, multiplying Connect Groups, a Church authentically caring and loving with the love of Jesus; sharing life together: being Church community as God purposes community. Making Disciples: A Church active in making more disciples formed in the character of Christ who then influences others to become disciples. Building the Kingdom of God: A church engaged in the transformation of people’s lives through community engagement. A church reproducing congregations and new faith communities; a church resourcing & developing Christ-like leaders for service. In Eastern Melbourne: A church that builds the kingdom of God in the wide region that HBC members live in (our Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria), and Beyond: A church that resources, equips and sends missional leaders beyond Eastern Melbourne and in other parts of the globe and partners in start of new missional communities amongst unreached people groups. Values Statement: God Centered: Prayer (and the Supernatural activity of God), Vibrant Worship, Bible Shaped, Authentic Growth Oriented: Growing Disciples, Multiplying Disciples Loving Community: Share Life Together, Giving Generously, Encouragement Empowered Ministry: Mobilized for Service, Spirit Enabled Mission Focused: Compassionate Ministry, Cultural Relevance, Communicating the Good News Future Looking: Faith Based Outlook, Hope Filled Rejoicing
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APPENDIX C
CIRCLE OF EMPOWERMENT IN HEATHMONT BAPTIST CHURCH CONSTITUTION MAY 2011.
EMPOWERS MEMBERSHIP
COUNCIL
EMPOWERS
EMPOWERS
STAFF & MINISTRY SENIOR PASTOR LEADERS
EMPOWERS
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APPENDIX D
HEATHMONT BAPTIST CHURCH VISION STRATEGY KEY INDICATORS
Missional: People are capable of articulating the message of the Gospel. Members telling stories of the transformative impact in theirs and other’s lives. People are acknowledging they are validated to be using their gifts and wiring in their everyday world and understanding who the people are who God has led them to. When HBC events are run, that people are bringing non-Christian friends to them People coming to faith and being baptized. In worship and prayer people are seeking God for the lost. A welcoming, hospitable environment to the stranger. Non-believers are involved/engaged in activities/ministries of the church. Caring Community: People identify Life groups as their primary source of caring community. People are bringing requests for prayer at multiple levels and there is evidence of prayer being offered. People are being welcomed and integrated into the church community. People in crisis are finding care, support and assistance. People are being followed up when they are absent. People who need ongoing care are identified and care is being provided. People with gifts, passion and ability for caring are identified and mobilized into the Pastoral Care ministry. Making Disciples: People expressing their confidence of who they are in Christ. People are identifying who they are discipling and who they are discipled by. People are receiving teaching from the Bible at multiple levels & mediums and expressing what they are learning. People are in active accountable relationships for their spiritual growth. People can be identified who are demonstrating spiritual growth in their lives. People are cultivating rhythms of spiritual disciplines that lead to outward demonstration of discipleship. Key leaders have been identified and empowered to be intentionally mentoring others in their walk with Christ. Building the Kingdom of God: People are identified, trained and mobilized to lead the planting of faith communities. People are identified, trained and mobilized beyond HBC for leadership and service beyond HBC. People identifying opportunities to meet social needs in our community and acting on it. HBC is actively engaged with meeting social needs in the developing world People are identified, supported and mobilized to serve as mission workers to eastern Melbourne and beyond. HBC resources in discipleship, mission and leadership are being made available and utilized by other churches/Christian organizations. People who have the passion, gifts and capacity are being identified and mobilized to bring leadership to further the work of meeting social needs. 176
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