Church… simples!

On Saturday I went down to Bristol for an event entitled ‘Simply Church’, asking the question, “have we made things too complicated”. It was an interesting day, thought-provoking and also a bit weird. Stuart Murray Williams was one of the main contributors, with Ben Taylor and Nick Bradshaw also leading sessions. As always, Stuart’s thoughts, questions and theological persuasion were right on the button, mainly asking the question of whether we need the ‘machine’ of church and its supporting structures for church to really happen. (Obviously this very much depends on what you define as church.) He also put the challenge of ‘double sustainability’ to us: that church should be sustainable and sustaining. This question is very appropriate to what I am thinking about and questioning at the moment. What gives life to us? What takes life away?

The audience for the day was a mixed group, but it would be fair to say that white, middle-class, middle-aged inherited church folk coming from large congregations were in the majority. Obviously for them, the challenge to do things more simply would probably have to be taken to their leadership and any changes that might be dreamt of or imagined would have to go through a few (hundred) meetings and done veeerrry slowly… Not that many people seemed to be coming from the younger age group (and I include myself here) or be thinking in terms of church planting. I found that strange.

Another thing I found quite strange was some of the things that Ben Taylor of ‘simple church’ seemed to be saying. While some of what he said was challenging and inspiring, he dismissed incarnational, friendship and organic evangelism as not working. He was arguing for a much more direct kind of route, which seemed to be based on looking of ‘men of peace’ [sic] (never mind about the women) and telling them who Jesus was and asking if they wanted to believe. Quite forthright and radical in ways, except while that what work in Glastonbury, I’m pretty certain wouldn’t work on Whitechapel High Street. He said that he was only interested in disciples who were going to go on to make disciples, which is a good reminder to me that I need to be asking the question of myself and also of others: are we living as disciple-makers as well as disciples? And he also asked the question of how many people in our churches who had been part of church for many years would be able to confidently pray in church; give their testimony or find different parts of the Bible (when relating this story to my co-pastor , he added “or forgive someone who did something to them 20 years ago” which I think is as important, if not more important than being able to win ‘draw your swords’) Ben pointed us towards an organisation called Mission Britain, which looks interesting and terrifying at the same time (at the moment the first video that appears when you go to their webpage is about how through the Olympics the UK is being dedicated to false gods… hmmm. So some of that side of their model/ theology is a bit freak-o-rific, but he did have some challenges for how we do things by default that do need to be challenged.

On the whole, it was an interesting day, and made me think that actually we do a lot of things brilliantly… so it was an encouragement not just a challenge. For some really exciting ideas of how we can be simply church, take a gander at this (and stay away from the Mission Britain pages)…

http://tallskinnykiwi.typepad.com/tallskinnykiwi/2012/01/practices-of-a-new-jesus-movement.html

Now that’s something I want to be part of!