‘Do not be ashamed then of testifying to our Lord . . . . . .
but share in suffering for the gospel’.
***
It is central to the missional communities of the Unbounded Church/Quantum Mission concept that they meet in public places, or at least spaces where the public regularly meet. The reason for this strategy is simple. It is to be an obvious Kingdom presence from which members can create and maximise opportunities to build relationships with, to engage with and to have gospel conversations with, those without Christ in order to draw them into the Kingdom, in particular, the vast majority who are extremely unlikely to ever be enticed (by most current ‘Outreach’ strategies) to enter a regular Sunday church service.
Many years of experience have shown me that it is only a miniscule fraction of today’s church members who are willing to be part of such a, or any other similar, front-line mission to their local community. Rather, the vast majority prefer ‘comfortable’ Sunday-church Christianity, with people they know and are comfortable with, and perhaps a weekly, yet still ‘comfortable’, lounge room or church-hall Bible study. This as far as you can get from sharing in ‘in suffering for the gospel’, as the Apostle Paul exhorted his apprentice Timothy (2 Timothy 1:8).
The result of this, ‘across-the-whole-church-landscape-apathy’, is that there is a severe limitation on the number of venues and locations that can be seeded with gospel communities. Consequently, this strong antipathy to actually engage in coal-face gospel mission has a very significant negative impact on the proclamation of the Kingdom of God to those stumbling in a Christ-less darkness.
I have often wondered why there is this almost ubiquitous refusal by church members to engage in local mission, particularly when at the very root of the word Mission (from the Latin verb missio meaning to send) is the concept of ‘going’, not sitting and waiting for the lost to come ‘into church’.
My usual, and I think largely correct, answer to my own ‘Why’ question above is quite simply ‘disobedience’ – disobedience to Jesus’ various commands such as ‘deny yourself’ and ‘GO and make disciples’. However, there is another factor that I (and many others) have remarked upon recently that gives me another word to describe the apathy to mission exhibited by the overwhelming majority of church members in the West. That word is ‘Embarrassment’.
Meeting in public places such as clubs, pubs, coffee shops etc. (as well as many other venues where missional communities are established) doesn’t just mean contact with non-Christians, our primary purpose, but they are places also frequented by members of local churches, often ones who are well known to the group. They will be going there to have a meal, often with their families, or to meet friends for a coffee, and frequently pass close by the area in which the group meeting.
However, it is frequently noticed that these church members, will make only a very a limited acknowledgement of the Christian fellowship meeting there, sometimes not even that, even though many will be known to them. Rather, they often just keep on walking, without coming over and having a chat or even giving some encouragement as they see mission actually happening.
The sad impression given is that they are actually ‘Embarrassed’ to see Christianity being on obvious display in the public square, rather than having the Apostle Paul’s attitude of –
‘I am not ashamed of the Gospel, because it is the power of God for salvation’.
Romans 1:16
This phenomenon, that I call the ‘Embarrassed-Christian’ syndrome, is in line with recent congregational surveys that show that when asked to select from a list of 14 priorities that they thought their congregation should invest in, ’starting a new missional venture’ came in a dismal 13th, or 2 percent of those surveyed.
So what can be done by those of us who do actually grasp the reality that the Church is in Crisis? The first thing we should do is to reflect on history and what it tells us about God’s expectation.
The fact is that we only have the churches we have today because of the faithfulness and sacrifice of Christians down the last 2000 years who have often suffered considerable cost including losing their homes, livelihoods and often lives. Such include Perpetua mother of an infant son, martyred in the 3rd century in the Roman games in Tunisia for refusing to worship Roman deities; the Czech Jan Hus executed in the 14th century who stood against the institutional church for the preservation of the evangelical gospel; William Tyndale who was the first to translate the Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek into English. Opposed by the English Church he had to flee to Europe to do it, where he was ultimately betrayed and then executed by strangulation and then burning at the stake. Then there are the 16th century Anglican reformers burnt at the stake in Oxford, England; John Bunyan (author of Pilgrims Progress), imprisoned for a total of 12 years, during most of which time not able to see his blind daughter, who was expelled from the official Church for standing for the gospel and (quite topically for our times) against laws constraining religious freedom; and the thousands of others who at great personal cost took Jesus call to ‘deny yourself’ seriously.
Secondly, we need to grasp the fact that, while we have got away with ‘comfortable Christianity’ for centuries in which the West was, up to the last century, a Christianized, Church and Christian-friendly society, that has now rapidly collapsed. 21st century western society is now an increasingly Christian-hostile one. In fact the missional landscape is one the western church has not faced for 1500 years, and the challenge for us is much like that time – the challenge of Pagan-Mission to our own culture – more accurately, cultures.
So, what can we do to turn around the current longstanding and rapid decline of Christianity and the highly damaging effect of that on society as a whole that is the result of local churches’ failure to win the lost in their local communities? Some thoughts-
1. We can, and should, at least try and start with our church leaders, if we have one. Encouraging them (pointing to the statistics of the chronic decline of Christianity which they should know) to think flexibly and creatively about what new, non-Sunday-Centric, In-drag (into Sunday services) missional strategies and entities could be developed for the now required pagan mission.
2. Tragically, there is little to no sign of such leadership, so if that doesn’t happen then it has to be up to individual Christians who are ‘not ashamed of the Gospel’, namely us! We could start by seeking out the few Christians (and they so sadly will be very few) who do grasp the Crisis and might be encouraged to join us in brainstorming new missional approaches that may possibly have some success in reaching the lost. Whatever such approaches turn out to be, they will most certainly not involve the traditional ‘getting people into church on Sundays’ approach that has been failing since the last century.
For mission to succeed, it will require self-denial; it also may well involve some ‘sharing in suffering for the Gospel’; it will certainly not be by ‘Christians’ who in effect ‘are’ ashamed of, indeed embarrassed by, any public display of the gospel but largely hide their ‘Christianity’ away inside various versions of four walls.
No, it can only be by those who in one way or another do what missionaries have always done, i.e. ‘Go’ to where the lost are. That is into go into public spaces and engage in face-to-face mission in word and deed.
May you be encouraged to do so, and also to seek, find and encourage others to join you on the journey.
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