Influences (part 1)

I thought it might be interesting to write some stuff about some of the influences that I feel as we prepare to lead a new church. I’ll also try and post some interesting links – most of my stuff comes over the tubes or through Amazon these days

My most recent purchase has been a copy of Total Church by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, who established a church planting network starting in Sheffield called The Crowded House.

I originally got into this by listening to a 3 part introduction that you can find over at The Resurgence (more on them later in this series, I suspect).

There is a lot to pull out of their concept of “gospel communities” – it’s probably better if you listen to the 3 part audio for a full idea. However, there are a few things in particular that caught my eye. The first is the idea of living as an individual as community, whereby you simply do the things you already do, but within a community setting. In a world full of busy people, the gospel needs to be something they can achieve, and I think this is one of the keys. We all eat, we all go shopping, we do numerous other things that it wouldn’t be hard for us to include other people in, just so long as we don’t try and “formalise” the atmosphere, which is what often creates the workload. We don’t have people round to eat with us, we have a “dinner party experience”. Involving people in your daily life, warts and all, is simple, but extremely challenging.

The other part of this concept that I like actually comes from a different author, but I think it ties in nicely. He calls it “Simplified Missional Living” and it’s a simple list of small things you can do that make your day-to-day life more missional.

Lastly, Tim Chester wrote 3 posts (one, two and three) on his blog recently about their gospel (/missional) communities, and the way they differ from other types of meeting. In particular, he emphasises that it’s not about having a meeting at all – some of their groups don’t have a formalised meeting at all. It’s about being a real community (see my first point), and being intentionally missional too.

Once I’ve actually got around to reading Total Church, I may have some more to say, but for the moment I am sure that we will be taking some of these ideas and trying to work out how to implement them within our context.