Current mood:

restless

Changing Church
School began again this week, and it started with a bang.

Our guest speaker in the third quarter of ‘Doing Church Differently in the 21st Century’ was Gary Goodell, author of “Permission Granted”. As well as being a church planter and author, Gary is a truly dynamic speaker. He is one of a growing number of Christians who are willing to voice what many more are thinking - the old, traditional forms of church just aren’t working any more.

To be relevant in this new century, the church needs to become less informational and more transformational. We need to stop talking about going to church, and start being the church.

Throughout the evening, Gary threw out sobering statistics left and right: last year 147,000 Christians worldwide were martyred for their faith, while 178,000 people decided to become Jesus-followers. But most of this is happening outside of the mainline denominations, which only account for 1.5% of all the Christians around the globe. Despite all the programs, worship bands and TV preachers, the sad truth is more and more people are actually leaving the church in order to find God. There’s something very wrong with this picture.

Whereas the institutional church seems to be struggling for survival in the third millennium, the early church was a dynamic, thriving, unstoppable organism. In 100AD, the worldwide church consisted of about 25,000 believers. By 310AD, that number had exploded to something over 20 million! Why? They had none of the technologies we have, none of the Christian bookstores or media, no attractive buildings, no attractive pastors. They didn’t even have a Bible as we know it. So, what were they doing?

Chapter 2 of the New Testament’s book of Acts gives us some clues. The early church were gathering in each other’s homes, getting together to eat and bless each other. As Gary Goodell puts it, they were ‘meating’.

There is something undeniably spiritual about sharing food with someone. Friendships are quickly cemented over a common meal, and it is hard to act super-spiritual during the act of eating. It is a great time for conversation. And you don’t have to have a degree to conduct this type of church meeting – it’s one of the most natural activities in the world. This regular sharing together is a perfect time to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, which was an integral part of the meal, rather than the ‘memorial snack’ that it has become for many of us.

Gary packed much more into his 90-minute session; this is merely a taster. It was a fantastic way to kick off a class.

On a slightly different note, Non-Con folks have made MP3s of the main sessions available online for free. David Ruis and Jackie Pullinger are definitely ‘must hears’. You can find them at:

http://ibobs.org/mp3/noncon/index.htm