Linking theology and practice

Some key quotes and ideas from Creature of the Word by Matt Chandler, Josh Patterson and Eric Geiger.

Available here from amazon.com and thinkivp.

In Creature of the Word the authors stress that practice arises out a ministry philosophy which arises out of theology.

“Theology is your church’s ‘thinking about God’. It is the beliefs to which you church holds doctrinally, what your church believes. Ministry philosophy is your church’s ‘thinking about ministry,’ the commitments that undergird all your church does. Practice, of course, is what your church actually does.” (106-107)

Your theology should not be unique. This is what you share with other churches. Your philosophy should flow from your theology, but be specific to your context.

“Bottom line: while practice is important, it is not the starting point. Yet sadly, when ministry leaders connect with each others, practice is typically where the discussion begins. Leaders from Church A, for example, hear about the work of the Lord in Church B. So they start observing Church B from a distance, eventually arranging to meet with some of their staff. Immediately they jump to ‘practice’ questions … but rarely at any point during such a meeting does anyone ask the deeper questions: What do you believe about ‘mission’ that causes you to set these priorities? Why is ______ so important here? Why have you designed your groups this way? The deeper church cultural question is the synergy between theology, philosophy, and practice. When these three come together, formed in the gospel, the impact is tremendous.” (112)

The encapsulates our repeated experience in The Crowded House. We want to talk about theology, but people always ask about practice. I always think (and sometime say), ‘Why are you asking me about practice? Our practice is nothing special. I’m sure you could work out better ways of doing this. And, besides, how we do it is not how you should do it as your context is different from ours. Let’s talk about theology and ministry philosophy.’ But people seem obsessed with the details of practice as if we have some kind of blueprint. We don’t!

The following questions from Creature of the Word may help think through your current practice.

“Christ’s great love frees us from needing validation or approval through programming. When we live in freedom, we can honestly look at every programme and ask the hard questions, like:
• What are we implicitly teaching through the giving of resources to this program?
• Is this programme furthering the gospel in the hearts and minds of our people and the community?
• Could the time we are asking of people be better utilized for the sake of the gospel in a different way than this?
• Would the removal of this programme serve to diminish or rather increase the capacity of our people to love and treasure Jesus and make him known?
• If we were starting from scratch with only the foundation of the gospel, would we do this programme in this manner?
• Why do we do this?” (188-189)

Creature of the Word

Top quotes from Matt Chandler, Josh Patterson and Eric Geiger, Creature of the Word: The Jesus-Centred Church, B&H, 2012.

Available here from amazon.com and thinkivp.

Creature of the Word is a book about what it means to create gospel-centred churches and how we can do this in practice. The ‘creature of the word’ is the church for the church is brought into existence through the gospel.

I’m not going to do a proper review. Instead today I’m posting a few favourite quotes from the book. Later I’ll post on my favourite chapter and offer some reflections on one theme in the book.

“Worship gatherings are not always spectacular, but they are always supernatural. And if a church looks for or works for the spectacular, she may miss the supernatural.” (42)

“The gospel must continually form community.” (51)

“If mission engagement is in the culture of a church without continual gospel reminders, the tendency will be to drift towards mission as a way to cleanse the conscience rather than a response to God’s mission for us. If expressive worship is in the culture of a church without continual gospel awareness, the tendency will be to focus on what is done for God rather than remembering what he has done. If transparency and honesty are in the culture of a church without continual gospel encounters, the tendency will be to discuss the sinfulness without repentance.” (102-103)

“C. S. Lewis quoted Samuel Johnson who said, ‘People need to be reminded more than instructed.’ Charles Spurgeon said, The most important daily habit we can possess is to remind ourselves of the gospel’ Remind the people you serve of the gospel. Continually.” (197)

“Prayer reveals the posture and priorities of our churches … Prayer (of the lack thereof) is the litmus test regarding our beliefs about self-sufficiency and dependence.” (219)

Five church planting dangers

Here’s an expanded version of five church planting dangers that I mentioned in a previous post. An edited version of this post appeared recently on the Gospel Coalition website (although for some reason they substituted the brief biography that I provided with one that’s out of date. Go figure!)

1. Planting a replica church

This church plant is a clone of your sending church or your own previous experience. This tends to be what happens if you don’t think much about the culture and values of the new church. You default to your past experience. This, of course, may not be an altogether bad thing. But it is a missed opportunity. Church planting is an opportunity to rethink church, creating patterns of church life that are more faithful to Scripture and more relevant to the culture. The other danger is that you try to be a large church with a small church planting team instead of seizing the advantages of being a small church.

What’s good about this: You’re a fool if you disregard 2,000 years of church history. So we need learn for Christian tradition and appreciate the Spirit’s work through the church in the past.

Constructive principle: Be creative.

2. Planting a reactionary church

This, in some ways, is the opposite of a replica church. This is what happens when people have had a bad experience of church. Church planting for some people is a way of running away for church rather than resolving issues or reconciling broken relationships. For other people the church plant is defined primarily in terms of what it’s not. People know exactly what they don’t want church to be like. But without a positive vision, the resulting church tends to have a negative culture or a culture that’s suspicious of other churches or which feels superior to them.

What’s good about this: We don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past and church planting is a opportunity to create something fresh – as long as you have a positive, biblical vision for what you want to be.

Constructive principle: Be positive.

3. Planting a romantic church

Remember all those conversations over a drink on a Sunday evening as you dreamed with your friends of your ideal church? Perhaps you dreamed of meeting in a coffee shop with some mellow jazz music in the background while you discussed faith with your friends over a latte. Perhaps you dreamed of rocking out the Christian classics you grew up with. Perhaps you dreamed of hour-long sermons rich with theology. And now your church plant is a chance to create this church of which you and your friends always dreamed. The problem is that, while you might create a church ideally suited to you, the chances are it will not be missional. Your personal set of favourite features won’t necessarily create an ideal context to invite unbelievers (which also means it won’t be an ideal church for Christians either for healthy Christian living must be missional).

What’s good about this: Church planters are often idealists driven by a vision of what could be. This will help you push towards creating a church that continually attempts to be more biblical and more relevant.

Constructive principle: Be missional.

4. Planting a restorationist church

This church plant is an attempt accurately to recreate what the church was like in the first century, to restore apostolic Christianity. Churches like this tend to spend a lot of time trying to identify precisely the patterns of New Testament practice. Of course it’s vital to be biblical. But replicating apostolic norms can be a futile exercise, not least because there seems to have been quite of bit of diversity within the New Testament. And that diversity existed because the apostolic churches were adapting to their contexts, both to the people within the church and the people they were trying to reach. The real danger with the restorationist mind-set is that you become inward-looking.

You end up having long debates over how exactly the New Testament churches celebrated the Lord’s Supper rather than throwing yourself into evangelism. You become like the people described in 1 Timothy 1 who are more interested in winning converts from within the church than winning converts to Christ.

What’s good about this: We do need to be biblical. One of the joys of church planting is the opportunity to rethink the way we do church to ensure it is faithful to Scripture and relevant to the culture.

Constructive principle: Be contextual.

5. Planting a reductionist church

In some ways this is the opposite of a restorationist church. Here the desire is to plant a church which is ‘incarnational’ or ‘missional’ or ‘contextualized’ (or whatever is your favoured buzz word). But you understand these terms to mean creating a church which closely resembles the surrounding culture. This concern can too easily lead to attempts to minimize the differences and therefore to minimize the confrontation the gospel brings. True contextualization includes identifying what repentance means in a culture. So it’s not about reducing the challenge of the gospel, but understanding the culture well enough so that we heighten or focus the challenge of the gospel. The danger facing such churches is that they reduce the gospel and assimilate to the wider culture. In the end they have nothing to offer. If we’re so like the culture that the differences are marginal, why should the culture bother with us? We will have nothing to add to what they already believe. Beside which, it’s a fool’s errand: we will never be as a ‘cool’ at MTV! What will be attractive to a lost world is the gospel we proclaim and the distinctive community life it creates (remembering that ‘distinctive’ is another word for ‘holy’).

What’s good about this: The desire to be contextual is good. We should try to minimise anything off-putting that is part of our church culture, but not part of the gospel.

Constructive principle: Be biblical.

 

WEST Porterbrook

I’m delighted to announce that the Porterbrook Network has formed an alliance with the Wales Evangelical School of Theology (WEST) to create ‘WEST Porterbrook‘.

This will enable us together to offer a set of training options for missional church from small group foundational material right through to PhDs. It’s a very exciting initiative that we anticipate will lead to new ways of training people for mission. There are few precedents for a residential college and a missional training programme to partner in this way.

For the moment our programmes all continue as normal. But our programmes will integrate to offer a pathway of training for church planting and missional church. Graduates of Porterbrook Seminary, for example, will be accepted onto the WEST Masters course if they want to do further accredited study.

In time we hope to develop new courses and we’re exploring a joint WEST Porterbrook campus in Sheffield.

Steve Timmis (Director of Acts 29 Europe and the Porterbrook Network), Jonny Woodrow (European Director of the Porterbrook Network) and myself have become full members of the WEST faculty. We’ll continue in our current roles, but will now teach at WEST from time to time as well as developing new programmes.

Click here for more information.

Subversive Fulfilment

Here’s my lasting outing (for now at least) on the theme of contextualization.

‘Subversive fulfilment’ is an idea expounded by Dan Strange. Dan summarises the relationship between Christianity and non-Christian religions as follows: ‘non-Christians religions are essentially an idolatrous refashioning of divine revelation, which are antithetical and yet parasitic on Christian truth, and of which the gospel of Jesus Christ is the ‘subversive fulfilment’”. Non-Christians have knowledge of God, but they respond with suppression and exchange (Romans 1:17–32). The extent of this suppression varies in depth and expression. This means other religions contain truth (because of general revelation and common grace), but they twist and distort that truth. So there is both ‘principle discontinuity’ and ‘practical continuity’ between Christianity and other religions. So the gospel both confronts alternative religious worldviews and offers appealing answers to the questions that other religions cannot themselves answer (‘subversive fulfilment’).

The idea of ‘subversive fulfilment’ is a really helpful way to think about a culture:

• What the hopes, desires, longings in the culture?
• In what ways are they are distorted version of right hopes and right desires and right longings?
• It will show you what repentance means for people, but also what good news means for people.

Be an intern with The Crowded House

Interested in learning about gospel ministry? Want an experience of missional church combined with training? Then being an intern with The Crowded House may be for you.

We’ve recently revamped our programme and added specialisms. We want to give our interns a real exposure to gospel ministry. We want to offer training and experience that will set you up for a life time of Christian service. A number of past interns have gone on to lead gospel communities or become active members of church planting teams.

And if you know someone who might be interested then please pass on these details.

Let me add that one specialism option involves being my research assistant.

Click here for more information and an application form.

We run our internship programme in partnership with the Porterbrook Network and Acts 29 Europe.

Has Facebook reached its peak?

My book on Facebook and social media is published and Facebook looses 600,000 UK accounts in one month. What can I say?

Seriously, this is an interesting article. Facebook still have over 33 million users in the UK. That’s over half the population and second only to the US where 54% of the population (169 million people) use Facebook each month.

Oh, and the drop came before my book was published.

Will You Be My Facebook Friend? is available here from thinkivp.com and amazon.com.

Sale at thinkivp

Thinkivp currently have a sale with lots of great books at 50% off. More details here. (I’m afraid American readers will have to sit this one out as thinkivp can’t ship to North America.)

A meditation on divine providence and divine love based on Psalm 31

In you, O LORD, I have taken refuge;
let me never be put to shame;
deliver me in your righteousness.
2 Turn your ear to me,
come quickly to my rescue;
be my rock of refuge,
a strong fortress to save me.
3 Since you are my rock and my fortress,
for the sake of your name lead and guide me.
4 Free me from the trap that is set for me,
for you are my refuge.
5 Into your hands I commit my spirit;
redeem me, O LORD, the God of truth.

• From what do you need ‘rescue’ and ‘refuge’?
• What’s the ‘trap’ in which you could fall? In other words, what temptation comes with your circumstances?
• Highlight each time the Psalmist says ‘refuge’, ‘rock’ and ‘fortress’. How is God a refuge for you in the midst of your current problems?

6 I hate those who cling to worthless idols;
I trust in the LORD.
7 I will be glad and rejoice in your love,
for you saw my affliction
and knew the anguish of my soul.
8 You have not handed me over to the enemy
but have set my feet in a spacious place.

• What makes the Psalmist glad? How might these truths comfort you?
• What does it mean for God to put you in a ‘spacious place’ in the midst of your current problems?

9. Be merciful to me, O LORD, for I am in distress;
my eyes grow weak with sorrow,
my soul and my body with grief.
10 My life is consumed by anguish
and my years by groaning;
my strength fails because of my affliction,
and my bones grow weak …

• How do your current problems make you feel?
• Do you find it helpful to express those emotions before God?

14 But I trust in you, O LORD;
I say, “You are my God.”
15 My times are in your hands;
deliver me from the hands of my enemies;
from those who pursue me.
16 Let your face shine on your servant;
save me in your unfailing love.
17 Let me not be put to shame, O LORD,
for I have cried out to you …

• ‘My times are in your hands.’ ‘Had any other condition been better for you than the one in which you are, divine love would have put you there.’ (Charles Spurgeon) Do you believe this? How does it comfort you?
• How does God’s face shine on you in the midst of your problems? In other words, how is God being good to you?

19. How great is your goodness,
that you have stored up for those who fear you,
that you bestow in the sight of all
on those who take refuge in you.
20 In the shelter of your presence you hide them
from all human intrigues;
you keep them safe in your dwelling
from accusing tongues.

• God has great goodness stored up for you. Compare the hope you have in Christ with what you think you lack in life.
• How do you think of God ‘sheltering you’ and ‘hiding you’?

21 Praise be to the LORD,
for he showed his wonderful love to me
when I was in a city under siege.
22 In my alarm I said,
“I am cut off from your sight!”
Yet you heard my cry for mercy
when I called to you for help.
23 Love the LORD, all his saints!
The LORD preserves those who are true to him,
but the proud he pays back in full.
24 Be strong and take heart,
all you who hope in the LORD.

• What comfort has the Psalmist given to those who feel abandoned by God?
• Who could you tell how God has helped you? Who could you encourage to be strong, take heart and hope in the LORD?

Making Psalm 31 Your Own

O LORD, I take refuge in you from ____________.
Don’t let me be ashamed by my problems.
Be my rock of refuge, a strong fortress to save me.
Free me from the temptation to ___________.
I put myself in your hands for you are my refuge.

I will be glad and rejoice in your love,
for you see my  ___________.
and you know the anguish of my soul.
When I feel trapped by my circumstances
lead me into a spacious place.

Have mercy on me, O LORD, for I am in distress.
Both my body and soul feel weak with sorrow.
But I trust in you for you are my Father.
My times are in your hands.
My problem ___________ is in your hands.
Let your face shine on me.

How great is the goodness you have stored up for me.
It’s much greater than  ___________.
In the shelter of your presence
you keep me safe me from  ___________.

Praise the LORD, for he shows his wonderful love to me
when I am besieged by  ___________.
In my alarm I said, “God has abandoned me.”
Yet you heard my cry for mercy.

Love the LORD for he protects his people.
Be strong, take heart, hope in the LORD.

New book: Will You Be My Facebook Friend?

I have a new book out looking at the gospel and social media entitled Will You Be My Facebook Friend? It’s a short book that expands material which previously appeared on this blog.

Will You Be My Facebook Friend? is available here from thinkivp.com and amazon.com.

Here’s what some kind people have said about it …

It’s striking, given the amount of time that many of us spend communicating with others online, how few of us have stopped to reflect on why we do so? This great little book will help you do just that, exposing wrong motives and showing us how faith in Christ challenges and changes the way we engage with others online. (Tim Dennis, UCCF Midlands Team Leader)

Get off–line, turn off Spotify and read this book! You’ll get through it in less time than many of us spend on Facebook each day, but this book will do you lasting good. Tim Chester writes honestly and urgently about both the potential and pitfalls of social media, calling us back to the 3D relationships we were created for. Like. (Dave Gobbett, Associate Pastor, Eden Baptist)

This book is concise, insightful, challenging and compelling. If social media is something that you, or those around you, are engaged with, you’d do well to un–plug for a while and plug–in to what Tim has to say on the matter. Uncomfortable truths are presented alongside wise, gracious advice. Above all we are repeatedly pointed to Jesus and encouraged to live real lives, rooted in genuine community and marked by the gospel. (Dai Hankey, Church planter and author)

Tim Chester is always insightful, and this little book is no exception. Wise, gracious, challenging and thoughtful, it will benefit anyone who uses social media. First class. (Andrew Wilson, Teaching Pastor, King s Church, Eastbourne)

SPONSORS
Support this site by using these links:

includes Tim Chester’s books
20% of every thinkivp purchase goes
to train Christian leaders in poorer countries