by Good News | Jul 23, 2010 | Magazine Articles
By Brett DeHart
How can a small and shrinking church, which no longer matches the demographics of its community, be faithful to the task of making disciples of Jesus Christ?
That is the question many smaller churches across the country face. It is the question that 170-member Austell First United Methodist Church has tackled head-on.
When I arrived a year ago, after having served as an associate minister at a large church, I realized quickly that the attractional model just wasn’t working here. We didn’t have all the bells and whistles of large church worship. We didn’t have the programs that parents expect and want for their children. We didn’t have the resources or money that would give us any hope that we could become a successful attractional church.
When you have been trained that church and making disciples is about attracting people to worship and to programs, it really knocks you for a loop when you realize you are at a church that isn’t successful at that and probably won’t be even with a lot of effort. It’s not that the leaders of Austell First didn’t want to attract new people and grow. But the odds were so stacked against them.
There’s nothing wrong with the attractional model, if you can make it work. But what about all those churches that aren’t and can’t? There’s more than one way to do church. We decided that if people won’t come to us, we’ll go to them.
“Bless Austell” is the name of the church’s vision to live out its mission to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.
Internally, our goal is to have our church and its members focus on blessing our community: being the body of Christ, the hands and feet of Christ in the world. Externally, we hope the campaign will signal to the community that we are ready to serve, to be an asset to this community. We hope others will want to join us in the blessing and eventually in the life of the church.
The church has developed ongoing programs for the community including free aerobics classes Wednesday nights, a free community dinner (Grace Cafe) every Thursday night, and a tuition-free, 5-day-a-week preschool (Feed My Lambs) for lower-income families.
The church is making a real push to engage area schools. It is involved in extensive outreach to its neighbor, Austell Primary School, where the church holds teacher appreciation lunches twice a year, volunteers at the school’s annual Spring Fling, and recently purchased and laid 60 bales of pine straw at the school. As a result of this growing partnership, the school naturally turned to the church to help sixteen families who lost everything when record flooding hit the city in September 2009. In addition, Austell First supports the community food pantry and clothes closet, delivers birthday baskets of goodies to residents at an assisted living home, and volunteers at community events.
While Austell First members are focusing outward, the church is also celebrating the work the Lord is doing inside the church. In the first six months of this year, compared to the first six months of 2008, worship attendance is up 13 percent and giving is up an amazing 27 percent.
The truth is that this church was already making an impact for Christ in this community through outreach. By placing that activity in a theological context with the Bless Austell vision, we can now celebrate the impact we are making for the Kingdom instead of being depressed because we aren’t a big attractional church.
Our community has changed and thus our definition of a successful church has had to change as well.
Brett DeHart is the pastor of Austell First United Methodist Church in Austell, Georgia. This article first appeared in the North Georgia Advocate and is reprinted here by permission.
by Good News | Jul 23, 2010 | Magazine Articles
By Eric LeMaster
Pastors and academics converged in early October at United Methodism’s Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina, to discuss the changing landscape of Christianity in North America and abroad. The convocation raised a call to action to reengage culture domestically, while highlighting the increasing prominence of the Global South in the world communion.
Notable among those speaking were Dr. Philip Jenkins, professor of humanities at Pennsylvania State University and author of numerous books on the growing Global South church, and Os Guinness, Christian scholar and founder of the Trinity Forum. Attending the event were pastors and church leaders from various mainline denominations from the southeast, primarily United Methodists.
Most speakers addressed the need to reevaluate the domestic strategy of mainline churches to engage culture and reverse the contraction of congregations in the West.
Kendra Creasy Dean, founding director for the Princeton Theological Seminary Institute for Youth Ministry, dealt with the loss of young people as a major failing of the church in our times. This failure, she says, is exhibited in the startling minority (only eight percent, according to the National Study of Youth and Religion) of American Christian teenagers who are “highly devoted”—those who are active in their churches, pray independently, etc.
“People who are in economic development know that the most important stimulus you can invest into a developing economy is to invest in young people,” said Dean, relating this to the need to make greater spiritual investments in the coming generation. She also asserted that the best way to develop young people is “to invest in the spiritual formation of the adults that love them best”—whether in the context of youth ministry, the family, or the general congregation. Strong leaders are necessary, she argued, to counteract what she called “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”—the relativistic, feel-good theology of choice for many church-goers, and a philosophy devoid of a dynamic relationship with Christ.
In a series of sermons concluding each day of the conference, Dallas United Methodist pastor Tyrone Gordon, senior pastor of St. Luke’s “Community” Church reiterated the need to be forward thinking in preaching the gospel. Gordon emphasized the inadequacies of current strategies to engage culture, especially the church’s role in combating social injustice.
“Micah spoke to a culture where the powerful were oppressing the powerless,” Gordon said, drawing from the prophet’s words that true religion is both social and spiritual. “Workers were being exploited. Immigrants were being ignored. The courts were corrupt.…The faces, the corporations, the political players may have changed, but the game sure looks the same.”
“Justice is lacking in our nation, and sometimes the worst perpetrator of injustice by silence is the church,” Gordon admonished. “We have bought into a gospel of prosperity that diminishes suffering, sacrifice, commitment, and surrender. We’ve been just naming it and claiming it, and just milking the people for whatever we can get, in the name of the gospel.”
The growth of the Global South.
While congregations in Europe and North America are shriveling, those of the Global South are seeing unprecedented growth and vitality. According to Dr. Philip Jenkins, there are practical reasons for the contraction of North American and European mainline church congregations. The great shift in demographics, a trend which he considers “the most important change in progress in the world today,” can be partly attributed to declining birth rates in Western countries that have predominately Christian traditions—a pattern Jenkins characterized as an “attempt to almost breed [ourselves] out of existence.” This is contrasted with African populations in countries such as Uganda, which is projected to double within the next several decades, and other nations which may see growth on the order of 15 percent or more.
The rapid encroachment of Islam in Europe through immigration and the relative stagnation of church participation also contrast dramatically with the Global South’s Christian expansion through conversions.
Global South Christianity tends to be very conservative by some perspectives, based on their stances on controversial social issues such as human sexuality. Jenkins warned against pinning “the North’s ecclesiastical labels on the South”—our packaged understandings of “conservatism” versus “liberalism”—but this has not prevented some very heated exchanges between the two groups. He quoted one liberal Episcopal activist as saying Africans should “go back to the jungle [they] came from and stop monkeying around with the church.” Equally inflammatory to some are the African leadership’s conservative views on the American Episcopal Church, especially concerning homosexuality, which some Africans equate with a “cancerous mass that must be excised from the body.”
The Christianity of the Global South also seems strikingly different from Western churches in its apocalyptic and supernatural emphases. “If you’re not prepared to take healing [and the supernatural] seriously, be prepared to take a different line of work,” said Jenkins. The secularization of Christianity in the West is far from the reality abroad and we should come to terms with a faith that is overwhelmingly “traditionalist, orthodox, and supernatural” in churches in Africa and South America. However, Jenkins suggested that if we look at Christian history, such a movement is truly a return to form.
Jenkins distanced himself from saying that one paradigm is better than the other—asserting rather that this is what works in the Global South, and that we should come to terms with it without trying to project onto it our domestic church politics. This includes scriptural interpretations that are unique to African, Asian, or South American sensibilities. “There’s so much of Christian history that we should look at in order to realize how many different ways Christianity has manifested itself, while being in the apostolic norm,” he argued. “The more we know about the history—the accurate history—the less we’ll be concerned about the wonderful world that’s opening up before us.”
Cultural challenges in the West.
In his presentation, Dr. Os Guinness maintained that our engagement with culture has been a losing battle, much due to the philosophical paradigm of modernism that Western Christianity helped to create.
Guinness warned of the distortions modernity has imposed on religion, but especially on Christianity. “Modernity has done more damage to the Christian faith than all the Christian persecutors in Christian history,” he said, noting this worldview’s fragmenting effect on individuals in society. “Many people have not only different hats in different places, but different souls. And faith is not compartmentalized.” He further argued that this has caused belief “to become not an authority, but a preference,” in which “the Lordship of Christ is denied.”
Relating this fragmentation of values to the church’s role in the public arena, he warned: “We must choose our stance in public life with care.” The U.S. as a nation has swung from a “privately engaging, [but] publicly irrelevant” faith mid-century to a faith that’s highly public, but privately inadequate. As an example, he cited the 2004 elections in which Catholic hierarchy considered withholding sacraments from members of Congress who were privately pro-life, but publicly pro-choice.
“I personally thank God for the decline of the Religious Right. I’ve attacked it for 30 years,” quipped Guinness, referencing his distaste for the way politicians have often used their religious affiliations to either garner support or direct public policy initiatives. “Politics is downstream from many of the sources of the ideas in our culture. They [public policy leaders] asked politics to do what politics simply can’t do.”
Like Jenkins, Guinness responded to the shift in spiritual gravity from the West to the South with optimism and promise. “The Global South is almost completely pre-modern. So they have yet to face the challenges that have undermined us in the West,” he said, “but their challenge will come to them. And our privilege is to teach them how we have failed.”
Eric LeMaster is a research intern at UMAction in Washington D.C.
by Good News | Jul 23, 2010 | Magazine Articles
By Frank Billman
“My experience at the Lay Witness Mission was amazing! It was the first time I heard stories about how Jesus was working in the lives of people I had gone to church with for 17 years. I was amazed at the transparency and openness that this event created. It felt natural to see everyone singing and hugging each other, which had been missing from our church. It was evident that the Holy Spirit was given freedom to work in our church in ways that we had not ever experienced. My life personally was touched as I watched the congregation come to the altar on Sunday morning and give their life to Jesus either for the first time or to renew their relationship with him. I never saw that happen here before!”
That is a pretty typical testimony from a recent Lay Witness Mission—a ministry that is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
The roots of this ministry stretch back to the Rev. Ben Johnson, a Methodist pastor in the Alabama-West Florida Annual Conference and a sought-after revival preacher in the late 1950s. Sensing that his work as an evangelist had grown stale, he started a prayer group. The members grew close to one another as they prayed for Johnson regularly.
Soon after that, he was doing a revival that proved to be difficult. He sent for his prayer group to come and they prayed for him before the service. When he stood to preach, Johnson was moved by God to ask several of the prayer group members to share a witness. It was a God-inspired moment. Those chosen to share were anointed and the congregation was electrified. Hearing lay people talk about what God was doing in their lives stirred the church. Johnson was led by the Spirit to not preach after that; he just gave an altar call. The people rushed forward to kneel and the altar service lasted more than an hour. It was the witness of laypeople rather than the preacher’s sermon that stirred them.
When vital lay witnesses described how they had been loyal to the church program, how they had served in many official capacities, and yet were lacking in a genuine experience of Christ, other lay people could readily identify with them. But their witness did not stop with describing an empty, meaningless Christian life. They went on to relate how their lives were changed through prayer and a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. Each of them shared relevant experiences of how their new life worked on the job, in the home, in the church fellowship, and in community life.
From the first experiment with using laypersons on a mission, several discoveries were made: laypersons listened to other laypersons; laypersons were willing to discuss pointed problems with other laypersons; dialogue resulted in deeper commitment than traditional altar prayer times; the laity and clergy learned to participate as equals in a group and witnessing laypersons both inspired and encouraged others to witness.
From that point on, when Johnson was invited to preach for revival services, he arranged in advance for his prayer group to come with him. During the meetings, he gave them opportunity to share. More pastors urged him to come to their churches. He would preach and intersperse laypeople to witness, but soon he discovered that power was released as the lay people told their stories. Gradually the weekend schedule began to shift and his preaching was minimized and he became more of a moderator. Later he found that these open and honest, prayer-filled laypeople could be effective in leading small groups. Sunday morning altars were filled. Prayer groups were started.
Word spread and soon more invitations were coming in than Johnson could handle, so he chose and nurtured lay coordinators to conduct the missions. What began as a clergy-coordinated event became a lay-coordinated event and the Lay Witness Movement was launched. In 1960, it was incorporated as the Institute of Church Renewal.
Soon the weekend pattern for missions was set. Teams of 15 or 20 laypersons went to a church for a weekend and stayed as guests in homes of the congregation. Often their presence proved to be a blessing in disguise and God ministered to the families where they were staying. The movement was reinforced by prayer. Every time a person got up to witness he or she would call on someone on the team to pray for him or her.
The church would gather with the team for a Friday night dinner, after which there would be spirited chorus singing and sharing by witnesses and small groups. On Saturday morning, coffee fellowships were set up in the homes of the congregation who invited their friends and neighbors to come hear the witnesses share. The church gathered for lunch and they divided to allow female witnesses to share with the women and male witnesses to share with the men.
On Saturday afternoon, the witnesses would go with church members to visit sick and shut-in members. On Saturday evening, there was more singing, sharing, small groups, and an opportunity for the church people to come to commit or recommit their lives to Jesus Christ. On Sunday morning, team members shared in the Sunday school classes and the coordinator spoke in the worship service. Another opportunity for church people to commit or recommit their lives to Christ was given.
A children’s coordinator and youth coordinator along with youth witnesses were brought to work with the kids and young people. Literally thousands of churches were renewed and revitalized and brought to spiritual strength as a result of lay people telling other lay people about their life in Christ.
The Lay Witness Movement became ecumenical and spread to the Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, the Southern Baptists, the Disciples of Christ, and other denominations. The movement also went international, starting with the birthplace of Methodism, Great Britain. Lay Witness Missions have been held in Australia, New Zealand, England, Ireland, Mexico, the Philippines, and other countries around the world. They have also been conducted as district-wide or cluster events involving multiple churches, as well as in prisons, in the stockade at a military base, in retirement centers, and in retreat settings.
During the second decade of its existence, what started as a movement became part of the General Board of Discipleship (GBOD). At the height of the movement in the early 1970s, there were more than 2,400 missions scheduled from Nashville, more than 100,000 team members on the rolls, and 1,200 coordinators.
Since that high point, the Lay Witness Mission entered a period of decline. The decline led the GBOD to discontinue it as one of their local church programs in 2003. Since Aldersgate Renewal Ministries (ARM) had then been an affiliate of the General Board of Discipleship for 26 years, it asked if it could be entrusted with the Lay Witness Mission program. The Board of Discipleship approved the request and we’ve been scheduling missions across the country ever since. Without changing the structure of the weekend, we’ve strengthened the preparation and follow-up materials.
We continue to believe that the Lay Witness Mission is an important, valid tool in bringing renewal to United Methodists and their churches. It follows the biblical pattern of Andrew telling his brother Simon or the woman at the well telling her village about their encounters with Jesus.
Many pastors can testify that a Lay Witness Mission in their past was an important component of their call to full-time ministry. The Board of Discipleship is beginning to offer Lay Witness Mission Team Member Training as an approved Advanced Lay Speaker’s Course. The testimonies coming from missions today demonstrate the continued effectiveness of this evangelism and renewal tool.
From a pastor in Louisiana: “The church gathered for its evaluation on Sunday night and everyone present could not stop talking about how it impacted their lives. It was described as awesome, fantastic, spiritually rewarding, motivating, very moving, and exhilarating. A new small group was formed. A desire for prayer groups and bible study, youth and children ministries will be addressed.”
From lay people at a church in Virginia: “We were spiritually recharged.” “I can’t think of a better way to have spent the weekend.” “I loved being able to share, knowing others share the same struggles.” “The weekend opened us up and brought us closer together. We got to know each other better.”
After 50 years, the Lay Witness Mission continues to prove itself to be effective in local church evangelism, renewal, development of small groups, and initiation of prayer ministries. It has enabled local churches to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.
Frank H. Billman is the director of church relations for Aldersgate Renewal Ministries.
