Try this mental experiment. Imagine that a swine flu pandemic swept through your part of the world, and that all public assemblies of more than three people were banned. And let’s say that, due to some catastrophic combination of local circumstances, this ban had to remain in place for 12 months.
How would your congregation of 120 members continue to function—with no regular church gatherings of any kind, and no small home groups (except for groups the size of three)?
If you were the pastor what would you do?
I guess you could send your people regular letters and emails. You could make phone calls, and maybe even do a podcast. But how would the regular work of teaching and preaching and pastoring take place? How would you encourage your congregation to persevere in love and good deeds, especially in such trying circumstances? And what about evangelism? How would new people be reached, contacted and followed up? There could be no men’s breakfasts, no coffee mornings, no evangelistic courses or outreach meetings. Nothing.
You could, of course, revert to the ancient practice of visiting your congregation house-to-house, and doorknocking the local area to contact new people. But how, as a pastor, could you possibly meet with and teach all 120 adults in your congregation, let alone their children, let alone doorknocking the entire suburb, let alone follow-up the contacts that were made?
No, if it was to be done, you would need help. You would need to start with 10 of your most mature Christian men, and meet intensively with them two at a time for the first two months (while keeping in touch with everyone else by phone and email). You would train these 10 in how to read the Bible and pray with one or two other people, and with children. Their job would then be twofold: to ‘pastor’ their wives and families through regular Bible reading and prayer, and to each meet with four other men to train and encourage them to do the same. Assuming 80 per cent of your congregation is married, that would be all or most of the married adults involved in regular Bible-based encouragement.
While that was getting going (with you offering phone and email support along the way), you might choose another bunch to train personally—people who could meet with singles, or people who had potential in doorknocking and evangelism, or people who would be good at following up new contacts.
It would mean a lot of personal contact, and a lot of one-to-one meetings to fit in. But remember: there would be no services to run, no committees, no parish council, no seminars, no small groups, no working bees—in fact, no group activities or events of any kind to organize, administer, drum up support for or attend. There would be just personal discipling, and training your people, in turn, to be disciple-makers.
Now here’s the question: after 12 months, when the ban was lifted, would you want to go back?
Oh the importance of 1:1 work! Given that I try and spend at least 10 slots a week doing this kind of thing with women, it was heartwarming to read an encouragement of the value of such ministry.
But can I just say that I had to chuckle at your stat: ‘assuming that 80% of your congregation is married’. My reality is a bit different to that – just 20% of our congregation is married.
This sort of challenge isn’t unprecedented in NSW. John Spooner’s Archbishops of Railway Square : a history of Christ Church, St Laurence (Sydney: Halstead, 2002; ISBN 1875684557; at pp.130-132) briefly outlines C.M. Statham’s response to the Influenza outbreak of 1919.
I would go back for the sermon and the singing, and absolutely nothing else.
Perhaps I should explain my earlier comment. It sounds like I don’t care about anyone in my church!
At the moment, we seem to be averaging around 30 or so visitors every week. I know that’s abnormal, but that’s where my comment is coming from. Our church is in the city, so we come from all over Sydney. This makes it harder to get to know each other. I have a full-time job and I fit ministry into my non-work time. I am drowning.
So the idea of meeting with just two people each week, and concentrating perhaps on one other thing (like evangelism), is incredibly appealing. I might not feel so guilty about all the things I’m currently not doing but feel I am supposed to be doing (another problem, I know).
But then, I prefer fewer and deeper relationships. I know other people are different; some thrive amongst large numbers.
I’m interested in whether others feel this tension (and what you do about it – especially as you get older and meet more and more people!).
Hi Tony,
This is exactly the situation we are in in Monterrey (in Mexico) – although it looks like the government is going to lift the ‘lockdown’ so we’ll be back to school and work on Wednesday. Church has been cancelled, Bible study has been cancelled – everything has been cancelled. The interesting thing (in our limited experience) is that visiting people has been cancelled as well. Its as if everyone has retreated into their own ‘island’ and has locked themselves away for a while. I expect that if the lockdown went on for a while longer this would slacken off because we’d all be going mad – but its interesting to see what happens when people start getting a bit paranoid.
I reckon everyone at our church will be very keen to go back to church when we can – just so we can hang with our friends and talk to someone other than our immediate family (nice as it has been to spend some extended time with them, run school lessons etc).
Pete
Tony, I hate it when you left-field thinkers force these thought experiments on us. Largely because they often make us see our blind spots or our inflexibility.
However I also hesitate because of the simplicity with which you present the pyramid ministry structure. It sounds so easy. But of course, it does not take into account the enormous ‘decay’ along the way. The man who turns out to be unable or unwilling. The person who gets seriously sick or dies. The bloke who moves away for work (good for the kingdom that he’s trained, but a spanner in your works)
It’s the same when the approach is applied to church growth – such mathematical possibility exercises almost never factor in death rates which can be in excess of birth rates in some place, not to mention incompetence and unwillingness – the ‘wastage’ due to different aspects of sin. Factor it in, and it’s not quite so simple!
But in trying to engage with the experiment, would you still envisage the pastor preparing a sermon to be delivered electronically? As Emma said, that (for want of a better term) ‘expert’ level of teaching might be missed by relying only on personal Bible study.
Hi Sandy
In the amazing world of thought experiments there is no leakage, no decay, and everything works out smoothly! Like those mathematical models about how easily the world would be won for Christ if each person just reached one other person who reached one other person etc.
As you rightly point out, the real world is very different. It’s messy because people are messy. And I haven’t even thought about whether there would be an ‘electronic sermon’ or not.
I guess the point of the experiment was to highlight just how dependent we are on the received structures of Christian ministry (the regular Sunday service, the small group, the men’s breakfast etc.), and how there are many other possibilities—some of them very fruitful—that we don’t give much time or thought to.
One way of expressing the goal of all Christian ministry is that we aim to make disciples who make other disciples; to make disciple-making-disciples. In all aspects of this work, pouring time into individuals is a vital and (it seems to me) neglected art.
For example, how do get men leading their families spiritually? Well, you could run a seminar, or give them a book to read, or preach some sermons on it. But in the end, the best way to train a man to be a Christian father is to meet with him personally; to read the Bible and pray with him; to show him how you do it (and how you fail at it!); to help him work out how he is going to make a start, and then keep meeting with him as begins to make progress. Can’t do that with every man in your congregation? Well start with some, and then train the best of those to meet with others, and so on. This is what ‘training’ (which has become something a bug-bear word) is really about. It’s discipling someone (in their knowledge and faith and service of others), with the aim of leading them to the point of discipling others.
As Col Marshall is so fond of saying: it’s about people not programs.
(Stay tuned for a book length treatment of this whole subject. First draft just finished!)
TP
Some problems with Tony’s model:
1) Time. It presumes that those 10 most committed men will have the time to do all the visitations. But in this world of blackberrys, laptops & teleconferences, even though they’d be stuck at home, work would still go on, and the grind of being out on church business 4-5 nights a week would soon get to you.
2) Distance. Tony’s model would probably work okay in a regional town or suburban church setting, where most of the congregation lives close to each other. But running it in a church like mine, where people from all 4 language groups often travel considerable distances to come to church, would be more difficult.
At the end, the people from the congregations probably would want to start meeting together again. If for no other reason than the chance to rebuild relationships and remind themselves that they’re part of something bigger. In the end, face-to-face contact still matters.
Despite my nay-saying, thanks for the post. It did get me to think about the issue.
<i>And I haven’t even thought about whether there would be an ‘electronic sermon’ or not.</i>
Hey I just thought of the brilliantest idea.
Pastors of (_underground) churches in Ch*na are rarely ever leaders of just one large group. Instead they oversee multiple small groups in a relatively large areas, having to travel extensively (often on foot or by bicycle) to teach and encourage believers meeting privately in homes.
In the UK I meet so many keen Christians who want to go to China with the intention of starting up new churches, doing evangelism, drawn by the statistics of large numbers of believers.
Instead, what is sorely needed are trainers who can coach these pastors to teach the bible clearly so that they are encouraged to carry on in the ministry faithfully.
Many of these believers come to faith not through big rallys, huge conferences or organised networks but through personal testimony of Jesus and the cross. In God’s wisdom, 1-to-1 ministry has become the very foundation for gospel and church growth in Ch*na.
To take a step further into the question, if once the ban was lifted you returned to the current model (which I certainly would) is there any reason not to continue the 1-to-1 model of discipleship as well?
If we see the two distinct forms of ministry as being complimentary, sustainable and Biblically foundational, why wait for a pandemic to implement it? In my mind it’s too hard and I have way too much other stuff on, but I often wonder if that defence doesn’t serve me as well as I think it should.
Hi Tom
Yes, you’ve got the point—it’s not a matter alternatives, and I’m certainly not suggesting we scrap meeting together as a large group! But just to take the example I used in the thought experiment: if we believe (as I think most of us do) that fathers should be leading their families spiritually, how can we train and encourage men to do this? Our minds seem to default to programmatic approaches (run a seminar, preach on it in church, etc.), and these are useful and good! But I don’t think we put nearly enough time and effort into personal work—into putting time into individuals, and then training and helping them to do likewise with others.
TP