“Oh we have x number of people coming to our church” boasted one of the group of people walking towards the convention tent. Then they turned to me “oh Dave, how many people are at your church now”. I wasn’t keen on the numbers feel to the conversation and I didn’t actually know the person really well. Nor it seems did they really know me or our church because when I gave them a straight factual answer, they looked incredulously at me and with a tone of disbelief said “oh I didn’t think you church was that big.”
The conversation was a few years back when I was pastoring a church in an urban, inner city context. One of the things I’ve picked up from conversations and from observing how questions are framed and articles written is that we have some assumptions about churches.
The assumption seems to be that the only type of church life worth talking about in our cities is that associated with headline churches with a strong reputation, well known leaders and congregations primarily made up of students, graduates and professionals. The assumption is that those churches are the ones which are growing, multiplying, training and equipping others and the ones that we need to learn from.
I tended to get the impression that people assumed our church would be small, struggling, unfruitful. Now, as it happened, in terms of those kinds of criteria, the picture was very different. Over a ten year period, we saw significant growth with a congregation touching around about 200, probably one of the larger conservative evangelical churches in the West Midlands. We were involved in multiplication, planting one new church, helping with the revitalisation of another and providing consultation to another potential revitalisation that in the end didn’t happen. We had significant involvement in international mission partnerships, helping to train and equip people in Egypt as well as providing training for potential pastors and workers nearer home. There are 4 other former members involved in pastoral ministry elsewhere. The church was diverse in terms of class, age and ethnicity.
The risk with me writing this is that this can become self promotion and could reflect a little bit of resentment. However, my aim here is not to defend or big up one church. The reality is that this would not be unusual. I know of churches in rural and market town settings where the perception would be that they are going to be small and struggling but are in fact thriving, planting and multiplying. I know of other urban churches that would have similar stories to tell to ours.
The point is first, that there is a tendency to connect historic reputation and specific cultural factors with current assumptions. Of course, the headline church is of a significant size and that enables them to do things like resource large staff teams, run training programmes etc. However the assumption that we need to learn from them and mimic them may be faulty. What they have done may have worked in their context but may not replicate in others and sadly sometimes those churches have sustained size through births and transfers rather than growing as they reach their community.
The second point is this. We may be getting some clues as to what we value and our values may mean that we are asking the wrong questions. The reality is that if you had asked me how to replicate our church in a similar type context that I would be able to give some answers. In fact, I would have probably said that the issue wasn’t what you needed to do to have a church of that kind of size, able to do those kinds of things in your setting but more about the things the barriers you might want to remove that would stop things from naturally happening.
Here’s the thing though. Would those really have been the priority lessons? I’m not sure. Such a conversation probably would not really have got down to the blessings we had experienced nor the particular and many ways in which I had got things wrong. It would still have assumed that there were things to prize -namely a worldly view of success.
The reality is that too often our questions are framed in a way that worship success. Even when we are encouraged to see what successful churches can learn from unsuccessful ones, the questions are still asked from within the same framework. I also have friends working in particular contexts where it looks incredibly unlikely that they will see mega growth. They are likely to stay fairly small. From a human perspective they are not successful. However, they are being incredibly fruitful as they share the good news, see people come to faith and disciple them in godliness. And sometimes, their fruitfulness might be described as “keeping the birds away from the seed on the path.”
If we frame the question wrong and if we come in with faulty assumptions and perceptions then we are unlikely to learn crucial lessons about fruitful, healthy church life from others.
Faithroots 