Am aware of many ‘contemporary trends’ in UK Church life. Read your post with great interest. Have you been approached by any Methodist churches or circuits in London District? I am in East London.

Could you please send an email link – would love to dialogue / discuss further with you. And set out more ‘background’ for me and Linda

Shalom

NH

i cant help feeling we lost less people when we were smaller. maybe the bigger churches should have a “riskier” planting strategy subdivide more quickly, even if there are some groups that are possibly less strong or stable than others. when we look back at who we were forming those new churches – how many church brand leaderships would back us these days ? !

i was struck very strongly by the teaching some years ago that it is healthy for a christian to have personal access to cell, congregation AND celebration sized groups. obviously i’m thrilled that there are big churches – so many people want to go to them, and they must be good at doing what they do. but do they encourage a certain passivity because their members may have the personal support of being in a cell sized group (10 to 20 ?) but lack the personal and relationship growth opportunities offered in a moderate sized congregation? how do people learn to prophecy when there is nothing between home group in someone’s living room and speaking in a microphone to several hundred people ? or leading worship, or teaching, or having ideas and seeing if they work ?

where do new leaders learn in practice – only a tiny percentage of practical learning of anything happens in classrooms, so if people dont get “small” leadership opportunities they will struggle to be big leaders. (i dont understand “small” by the size of the group – leading a cell group effectively might be more pastorally demanding than being an elder with a mainly admin role for hundreds of people).

i’m biased – my best area of function is in congregations of 50 to 100 people – but i think there are a lot of people like me who can have a go at a lot of things and can grow and contribute, but in larger groups we easily get overlooked, so we will never build up the confidence and experience to participate enough to really feel we “own” something. in “people sized” congregations even new christians can feel like they have something to give and can feel like leaders are accessible and responsive to them. quiet people dont have to compete so much to get attention.

i have been part of several different “new churches” when they were new and of course i have a nostalgia for those days, but there is no backspace button in kingdom life. how can we draw on the wonderful lessons we learned in those early days and integrate them into moving forward ? why do the very people who pioneer new churches sometimes find it harder than anyone else to plant out other people to lead new congregations in the same town ?

i had a prophetic picture some years back about a spider plant. the natural way it grows is by sending out small “spiders” just like them, on a stalk. in nature these spiders touch ground and root, and eventually the stalk dies off when the baby no longer needs nurturing by the mother. you will see an older plant surrounded by a whole ring of new ones who then make their own rings. i felt that it was for a particular pastor at that time that he should be nurturing and planting out churches and ministries whilst keeping his roots well tended in our fellowship. but although he could happily encourage activities that were outside the range of our town or outside the ministry of the church, but each time there was a potential “church plant” ( there were 3 that i was aware of) he stopped it just as it was starting to put out roots and called everyone back into the “mother church”. like doing the preachers training course – i think 30 or 40 of us did it over the years and very few ever actually got to preach. i know there were very high disenchantment and disaffection rates – for some it was disastrous for their personal lives, mercifully lots of people channeled their energies out into missionary or caring organisations. those who remained in the church were also highly dedicated and self motivated people but a lot of the new people would leave after a while – king’s new clothes and all that. i wish i could say that that church was an exception – sadly i dont think it is. i’ve been involved in other new churches with similar tendencies even if not as strong.

i’m still passionate about church. but i think we have to face some of these issues. i think the growth of the use of social networking on the internet etc will appear to the insecure leaders, and even some apparantly solid ones as making things worse, but as i see people relating to each other in a much more open “flat” leadership way in groups of different sorts i think, i hope, the eventual effect will be of people transferring those experiences into society and i hope church life will be willing to cope with the growth and development.

Maybe we need to do less and be more. Maybe we need to slow down but up our game. Maybe we need to settle down and strengthen up. Maybe it’s less about going out than growing up. Maybe what we need is to recall the pastors and the teachers out of the closet badly labelled “Legalistics” and let all the five/fourfold ministries contribute properly to maturity of the body of Christ. Perhaps we need a rebalancing of “everyone’s a missionary” with “not everyone’s an elder.” Has the teaching in our churches enabled our people to be able to see to four corners of the earth (aka vision) but not know what to do with itself on the four square inches it stands on? The general buzz and talk these days seems to be more about ideas than instruction.

When I look at the teaching of all the New Testament greats, what I see is a need for saltiness more than strategy, Christ-likeness more than creativity, and even maturity over what is often labelled “mission”.

Some of this may well just be about leaving behind the consumerism, individualism, branding and identity creating business talk and getting back to basics.