An email dialogue between Tony Payne, Simon Flinders and Steve Timmis, co-author of Total Church. (Read Parts 1 and 2.)
From: Steve Timmis
Hi Tony and Simon,
At this stage, I have no idea how long this will turn out to be, but we’ll see what transpires!
Thank you, Simon, for your kind and thoughtful words at the close of your email. I am thankful that Total Church has been a benefit and encouragement to you, and our prayer is certainly that it will prove to be that for many people. I do hope you realize that we do not labour under the delusion that this is the book is the final word! Our aim was to state some principles clearly, and to initiate reflection and long overdue discussion about what it means to be the people of God. Some sort of follow-up is being considered, but we will probably wait to see what happens to Total Church once it gets published in the US in the autumn.
I think I will resist the temptation to revisit the issue of whether church is an all-encompassing category. I do think the concept of the people of God is, and my only argument is that ‘church’ is the term which describes those people in situ, as it were. I just can’t get away from passages like Deuteronomy 4: it is as Israel lives under the law of God that it displays that it is good to live under the reign of God. As you know, Deuteronomy is preparing people to live in the land of promise, and the aim is that as they, for example, leave the corners of their fields unharvested so that others may glean, they model the reign of Yahweh. People will look at the farmer leaving gleanings and conclude something about the nation, its law and its God. Its corporate life, lived out in a myriad of small ways, points to its message and so its King. I find the language of Deuteronomy 4:20 incredibly suggestive. Israel comes out of Egypt and goes into the Promised Land as God’s image. This and similar imagery is picked up throughout the New Testament: for example, Matthew 5 picks up the imagery of the life of the community lived out in the world proclaiming the gospel.
However, I do take on board the point you raise about how people understand the term, and I suspect you’re right, though part of our aim was educative and restorative! I appreciate your comment, Simon, about you believing in both individual and corporate engagement. Amen to that! Where I am a little surprised is when you start to get concrete with your concerns. I will try to address them point by point:
“[P]astors/teachers feeling constrained to be evangelists/missionaries as a first priority and to squeeze the work of shepherding the sheep in around seeking the lost”: In our community-centred model, the opposite is actually the case, and we tried to describe the dynamic of that in the evangelism chapter. Pastors do not have to ‘do’ the job of mission, but work as part of a team. They make a distinctive contribution to the process of evangelism by teaching the Bible “in public and from house to house” (Acts 20:20), so that God’s people recognize who they are and live accordingly. They do model the responsibility and privilege of building relationships with non-Christians and introducing them to the believing community, but that is anything but a diversion, as Jesus made non-Christians his priority. One of the most effective ways the sheep can be shepherded is by involving them in such relationships so that they can be taught ‘along the way’.
“[C]hurch services being tailored to seekers in such a way as to dilute proper praise, prayer and preaching”: In our community-centred model, the opposite is actually the case because mission does not primarily occur through a meeting (though it does happen in that context), but primarily throughout the shared life of God’s people. We have never followed nor advocated a seeker sensitive model. We do encourage a thoughtfulness to non-Christians (but that is a heart-set, rather than a strategy) which means that we explain simply what we’re doing. But we want to expose them to the people of God joyfully teaching one another through psalms and hymns and spiritual songs (Col 3:16). We want them to hear us talking naturally and respectfully to our heavenly Father. We love to see them exposed to the word of God being taught faithfully and relevantly (you can listen to some of our talks on our website to see if we achieve this!).
“Christians feeling like they are sub-standard members if they’re less evangelistically able than others”: In our community-centred model, the opposite is, once again, the case true because now Christians contribute to mission as part of a team. Again, we attempted to spell that out in the evangelism chapter. By all of us being involved in the gospel task as a community, then I can introduce Pete to my family, which will include John, who is natural evangelist.
“[U]ndermining of the importance of the gathering in the minds of Christians so that engaging with the world starts to feel more important than engaging with God”: In our community-centred model, with its accent on shared life, our aim is not to diminish our meetings but to raise the rest of our life together. Because we do share our lives together, our meeting together is all the richer and more real. Furthermore, engaging with God, one another and the world is all of a piece for us, and each informs the other in a practical and dynamic way. We really do love our ‘gatherings’. They are family times and more often than not a delight.
As for your shared theological concern about church replacing gospel, I suspect this is, at least in part, because of the way we use the term ‘church’. As I tried to explain in my last email, there is no confusion in my mind between gospel and church. Church (continuing to use it in the way I have throughout!) is the fruit of the gospel. We don’t say church saves you; it is only Christ crucified, risen and reigning who does that. But we do say that God litters the world with communities of light that demonstrate the truth and effect of the gospel. I can only go back to Ephesians 5 once more: Paul is teaching them how to live as a community of light, and how their corporate life will be radically different from the dis-communities of darkness out of which they have been called. It is by their life together (created by the gospel) that they expose and dispel the darkness around them. Christ shines on the dead (conversion metaphor) as the light of the transformed community radiates. We continually emphasize the gospel as a word to be spoken by way of explanation. Of course God saves independently of his people sharing their lives (e.g. the Ethiopian eunuch), but that sovereignty doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility of developing our life together under his gracious rule. Our job is to be faithful as God’s people together, and to be faithful as individuals in whatever context we find ourselves. God will save through our corporate witness, individual witness and even without our witness! I cannot think of anytime when we have claimed that church is a common denominator in every life transformed.
One of the characteristics of The Crowded House from the perspective of people who spend some time among us is the way gospel functions as a verb: we gospel one another as we bring the good news of the kingdom to bear upon one another in the nitty-gritty details of our lives. I hear the gospel taught far more now than I have in any previous context: I hear ordinary, everyday Christians speaking gospel truth to one another in ordinary, everyday life situations in a way that I never have in all my long exposure to and involvement in confessional evangelical contexts throughout this country and in different parts of the world. As I listen to church leaders in more traditional settings with a more conventional understanding of the Christian life, I am always so very thankful that I don’t have their problems and difficulties. It’s not that what we have here is perfect (far from it!), and we aspire to do better, but there is something truly authentic and profoundly biblical about what I see and experience.
Phew! That was longer than I expected. But there it is. I’ve enjoyed our discussions immensely, gentlemen. I’ve found them helpful, not least as I prepare for my trip down your way in a couple of weeks. So thank you for your stimulus and thank you for your grace. I can honestly say that, as a result of our engagement, I love the Lord and his gospel more now than I did before.
I look forward to our face-to-face! In the meantime, continue to enjoy grace.
Love,
Steve
From: Tony Payne
Dear Steve and Simon,
Three final, final thoughts from me.
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Enormous thanks to both of you for giving of your time and your selves in engaging in the discussion as you have. I know how hard I found it through the impersonal medium of email to express my thoughts and reactions clearly without it coming across more sharply or aggressively than I wanted it to (because I didn’t feel ‘sharp’ or ‘aggressive’ at any stage!). It took a lot of care in the writing (and re-writing); I know you’ve done the same, and I’m very grateful for it. The end result, I think, will be very helpful and encouraging to many.
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I recently came across a quote from Confucius, who said that the first and absolutely necessary task of government was “to call things by their right names”. A good deal of our discussion has been wrestling with this. What has become clearer to me through your responses, Steve, is that I can go a long way with your model if I clarify it in my own mind by using some different (and I guess I think more accurate) names.
So there is the regular ‘gathering’ or ‘assembly’, which is when a group of Christians get together to meet with each other in the presence of Christ, to hear his word, to respond to him and to edify each other (the New Testament ekklesia or ‘church’). Non-Christians sometimes attend, and (as you say) when they do, it’s largely a matter of us being ourselves and explaining things as we go along.
Then there is the ‘shared life’ (‘fellowship’?) of those who are gathered, which exists not only when they are gathered but continues in their relationships with one another the rest of the time, and is lived out day by day in godliness, love and mission. This new life in Christ, which is a shared, relational life as well as an individual one, shines as a testimony to the world. It is not salvific, nor is it a ‘strategy’. It functions as an ‘adornment’ to the sound doctrine of the gospel (naming it in the words of Titus 2:10, where the godly life of the Christian slave is on view).
One of your big points, Steve, is that ‘standard’ evangelicals tend to set the bar pretty low on this second aspect. It’s hard to argue there. There is not the strong sense of mutual belonging and commitment that is captured in New Testament phrases like “love one another earnestly from a pure heart” (1 Pet 1:22). Rather than seeing our relationship with and commitment to our brother and sisters in Christ as fundamental and life-determining, we easily see it as just one more responsibility to be juggled along with the rest. And your experience is that when this is strong (what you describe as finding one’s identity in the community), mission just flows out. The gospel is at the centre of people’s lives (as shown by their love for one another), and this adorns the gospel and makes it attractive. And then there is the natural context in which the gospel is shared—as people come into close contact with Christians-loving-one-another (what you mostly mean by ‘community’).
So I guess my suggestion for some further theoretical clarification would be to look again at the Bible’s names for what you want to say—namely ‘in Christ’, ‘Holy Spirit’, ‘gathering’, ‘fellowship’, ‘love’—rather than the looser and less biblically grounded ‘community’ and the always confusing ‘church’.
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And lastly, not wishing to close with the dry bread of conceptual clarification, I’d like to say that this conversation has really stimulated me to think about the life of the congregation I am part of, and about the congregation we’re thinking of planting later this year. What’s our culture like? How well do we hang together, and mission together, as part of everyday life? And what could we do to foster and build this?
Anyway, with much gratitude again to you both I will close. Now I just have to work out how to get all this to a publishable length! Maybe I’ll just do it in two parts and be done with it.
Your brother in Christ,
Tony
