Tag: Evangelism

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A home church Oasis

My friend Phill Brown, who runs Oikos, an organisation dedicated to promoting and helping the house church movement in Australia, in a recent newsletter included an account of a group that meets in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. The approach is creative and quite novel, and very attractive. I asked Phil’s permission to reproduce it on my blog, and he has graciously acceded to my request. You can read about Oikos, sign up for their newsletter, subscribe to their quarterly magazine, and prose their many books at www.oikos.org.au.

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Greetings from Switzerland,

Today I awoke to snow on the ground as I enjoy some care at a holistic well-being clinic and feel very grateful. I’m reminded of our Oikos friends who operate a café in outer suburbs of Melbourne – who call their café meeting place like a ‘Switzerland’ a neutral space, be encouraged by their story….
Blessings

Phil Brown

“Are you weary, carrying a heavy burden?” ‘Come to me and I will refresh your life for I am your Oasis” Growing out of Matthew 11:18, Martin and Cher operate a Cafe in SE Melbourne that is used for workplace skills training, and also use the space to invite friends and make disciples in a caring and nurturing space – a safe oasis.
As they reflect on their values; they say – “We fall in love with Jesus and trust when we do our part, we let Holy Spirit and the Word do its transforming work”

They are growing in numbers, locations, leaders and the spiritual depth of people involved. Our vision is “making Jesus disciple makers”. Here is a glimpse of their journey and approach to reaching people:

“We operate a cafe so we use the cafe as a primary meeting place. Its neutral, safe and non-religious so people feel safe to come”. We call this “Switzerland” because it’s a neutral space to do Simple Church. Our simple process is: Connect in the cafe and invite customers into casual, enjoyable and sincere conversations.

Next, we invite them to a social gathering to eat with and meet likeminded people make friends. And then we invite them to a Jesus meal where we gently structure the gathering with prayers, devotion and dedication to Jesus. Someone different will lead the meeting and bring testimony, scripture, story or songs that gives honour to Jesus.

We regularly run a men’s breakfast and a women’s breakfast which has been much appreciated and bought meaning connections.

The group has been going 2 years and we have tried and failed on a few things, but persevered with what seems to be working for us.

Here are a few ideas that we have found work for us.

Consistency

We meet every 2 weeks and publish a calendar on a whatsapp group to let others know when and where we will meet. We have dates set for 3 to 4 months in advance to help everyone make plans.

Food

We pivot all we do around the relaxing joy of eating together. Hospitality is a command and we do our best to host and feed guests well.

House to House

We deliberately and intentionally move the meetings from the cafe into people’s homes. We began with a BBQ at our house and now pass the baton from house to house. Now every alternate gathering is in a house. We have a “respect” rule that when we are in the government of someone’s house they get to run and lead the meeting however they see fit. We have had glorious times.

Day and Time

We choose to not meet on a Sunday so we typically meet on a Friday or Saturday night. Some nights can be noisy with so much chatter and laughter… always a good sign. Also, the more impactful an evening the later everyone seems to leave. Some just don’t want to leave which is another signal it’s been a hearty night.

Leaders

We prayed about 9 months ago for leaders and what has happened is people are approaching us, asking can their house be the next venue. This has been an electric answer to our prayers.

Inviting

What we have noticed over the last 6 months is that people like the gatherings, and feel safe enough to invite friends. We are now about 4 generations deep in invitations which is a very exciting signal. We always have new people tagging along for the first time… who then become regulars… who then start inviting their friends. We call this “stickyness” or being “sticky”. When people “stick” they start inviting others naturally with enthusiasm and growth occurs organically.

Growth

We are growing in numbers and fast out growing the cafe for us all to fit. What is more important is the spiritual growth and maturity we see in the group in terms of attendance, generosity, Godly conversation and honesty. Its normal for members to ask for prayer or share a struggle so others can administer some wisdom and care. The core group has grown with 3 existing houses being used, and with 3 more houses opening up soon. We desperately need to keep the gatherings small and intimate between say, 8 to 14… so all can talk and participate. Managing larger groups at the cafe is a bit easier, and the gatherings in homes seem to default to the perfect number leading to great encounters.

Demographics

Our group is made up of diverse people from unsaved searching folks to well established Christians from a variety of church backgrounds all enjoying fellowship together. All united in a caring, loving, safe learning space. It’s very sweet.

Plans

We plan to move from house to house so that each house becomes its own regular venue with its own growing group. We like the Discovery Bible Reading (DBR) method which is simple to do and easy to replicate and have plans to test and implement that as a regular feature of our gatherings. Finally, we have emerging leaders who we will coach and resource to ultimately lead their own groups using the cafe as a central mission base of sorts.

Geography

Since our group was birthed from local customers, our group is hyper-local, meaning, most members can walk to the cafe. It’s not unusual to see members at the cafe in groups during the week for coffee or lunch enjoying deep and meaningful conversations. We may open up a migrant worker group in Cardinia and also possibly support a couple moving to Geelong who are keen to start another group. We follow the leading of the Lord “as the wind blows” so to speak.

Evangelism

None of this happens without an outreaching “heart”. To model any form of healthy discipling we need to be able to model the process of engaging strangers into powerful and trusted kingdom conversations. Building trust with authenticity are very important ingredients to our outreach efforts. We use and train our own ” Harpoon Method” of biblically based one-on-one evangelism which has a very high success rate and always leaves relationships intact. We have a deep heart to see any church doing small groups to add an outreach element to the group to mature the discipleship pattern.

Our values are:

Empower the Priesthood of every believer
Every conversation from the start of a relationship is a discipling conversation
Love each other, be king, patient and gracious to each other
Fall in love with Jesus
We do our part and let Holy Spirit and the Word do its transforming work

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Joining God in his Mission

In reading through the Summer 2021 issue of the Australian Oikos magazine, I came across an excellent article by Alan Hirsch, a well known author, coach, advisor, consultant and mentor in the field of (and I’m struggling here!) of home churches, house churches, evangelism, and no doubt a lot more. He is the author of a number of books, including ‘The Forgotten Ways’. The article is in twelve parts, but what really struck me was part seven, which was for me an eye-opening and revolutionary insight into personal evangelism. With Alan’s permission, I have reproduced part seven below. 

I understand (from someone in our small group) that C.S. Lewis said the same sorts of things in ‘Mere Christianity’ a long time ago. I read ‘Mere Christianity’ as a very young Christian in the early sixties, but have no memory of it at all, other than that it was incredibly helpful at the time.

Here’s Alan’s article.

It is false to say that only Christians can experience God.

One of the most basic assumption of the incarnational missionary is to assume God is already involved in every person’s life and is calling them to himself through his Son. Our mindset should not be the prevelant one of taking God with us wherever we go. Instead our minset should be that we join God in His mission.

This means that the missionary God has been active a long time in a person’s life. Our primary job is to try to see where and how God has been working to and partner with him in bring people to redemption in Jesus.

Understanding that all humans are made in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:27) and in the deepest possible way made for God, we can assume every human is motivated by spirituality and search for meaning. Even idolatry indicates people are searching for something beyond themselves. It is deformed spirituality to be sure, but it is spirituality nonetheless — and you can work with that. Recognise that behind many of the things not-yet-Christian people do lies a search for something else.  C.S. Lewis once noted that all our vices are virtues gone wrong. If we take this as a clue, we can develop new missionary eyes to see what God is up to in people’s lives. 

Let’s take a deeper look at this: Consider Las Vegas, the consummate sinner’s town. And it is that — a deeply broken place where people get really messed up. But can we put aside our moral misgivings and choose to look at the gambling dens with more missional eyes. We might ask, what is the person who is sitting at the slot machine really searching for? Perhaps it is the search for redemption but in the wrong place. It is the belief that to win the jackpot means to be be changed and transformed into a new life. This search might also be driven by a now-pathalogical need to take risks because life has lost its sense of real adventure. 

We can literally work our way through any type of event or activity in the following way.

GAMBLING
What is really being sought?  
• Redemption by luck or money
• Finding meaning in doing things
• Need for risk
How the Gospel addresses this issue\
• Hope
• Overcoming unhappiness
• Call to risk living adventurously and risk loving as a disciple

SPORTS EVENTS
What is really being sought?
• A cause to belong to
• A real cause that aims at changing the world
• Transcendent experience
How the Gospel addresses this issue
• Real transcendent experience
• Community with team or fans
• Authentic community

PUBS
What is really being sought?
• Community
• Real but loving community
• Partner
How the Gospel addresses this issue
• Highs without drugs
• Overcoming loneliness
• Non-exploitative relationships
• Fun or chilled time
• Lasting joy

DRUG TAKING
What is really being sought?
• Ecstatic experiences
• Encountering God
• Escaping from live
How the Gospel addresses this issue
• Meaning and purpose
• Overcoming guilt and pain
• Forgiveness and healing

MOVIES
What is really being sought?
• Hearing the stories and myths
• Connection with the story that that shape life, makes sense of our stories
• Suspension of disbelief
How the Gospel addresses this issue
• Reality, not fantasy
• Entertainment Escape
• Feeling again (laughing, crying etc.)
• Passion leading to compassion

We can trust that because of the way God has designed us, in the end human beings are always searching (albeit in false and idolatrous ways) for real meaning, authentic relationships, to love, and to be loved in return.

One more dimension of this that must be mentioned is that all people have religious experiences. It is false to say only Christians can experience God. Anyone looking at a sunset can experience an in-breaking of God-awareness. In The Color Purple, Celia recalls a time as a child walking with her mother past a field of violets when she felt that God was making a pass at her in the flowers. God is constantly ‘making a pass’ at us in everyday experience — we simply need to become much more aware of Him. People call these experience theophanies (God encounters), and our task at God’s sent people is to bring a meaningful interpretation to these experiences and point people to Jesus as the centre of the God-experience. 

Another way to look at this role of seeing ‘the virtue in the vice’ is to conceive of ourselves in terms of one of our deepest identities as disciples — namely, the priesthood of all believers. In his book ‘Untamed’ Alan Hirsch and his wife Deb suggest that unlocking this is one of the most potent things we can do to allow God to work through all of His people. A priest is essentially someone who mediates the knowledge of God. Our priestly role, therefore, is to introduce people to Jesus and Jesus to people. After that as far as we can, our role is to make sure it is a right understanding of Jesus we are mediating, and then step our of the way — let Jesus o his thing with people. He knows exactly how to deal with them. 

Let’s ask the Spirit to open our eyes to show us where He is at work all around us, and how He wants us to join Him in His mission.

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Apostolic preaching . . . and preaching today

Recently in the course of my daily bible reading, I read Acts chapter 17. I was struck by what Paul and Silas in Thessalonica and Athens were preaching about.

The first hint is in verse 7, where they were accused of acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus. This suggests to me that they were preaching about the Kingdom of God.

Then in Athens, in the famous address to the Areopagus, as his hearers were trying to work out what Paul was talking about, Luke records that ‘Others said “He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities” — because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection’.

Lastly, in verse 30, Paul asserts that ‘The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead’.

So Paul was speaking about the Kingdom of God, the resurrection and the final judgement. And note that this preaching was not to the church, but to outsiders, to the unconverted if you like.

I have a very interesting book entitled ‘To Preach or Not to Preach: The Church’s Urgent Question’, by David Norrington.

The author argues that all preaching in The Acts of the Apostles was delivered to outsiders, as part of the evangelistic endeavour, and yes, he does deal effectively with possible exceptions. In New Testament times spiritual growth was achieved not by the use of the sermon, but by a variety of other means, all designed to help produce mature Christians in mature Christian communities. There is nothing to suggest that these means included the regular sermon. He calls for the abandonment of the regular sermon delivered to believers, and for it to be used as it was in Acts — to unbelievers in an evangelistic setting.

He makes the obvious point that: ‘while New Testament and extra-biblical records of these early meetings are sketchy, it is quite clear that first century believers were expected to be fully involved in all of the activities of the church. The practice of small-scale meetings in homes was ideally suited for such one-another ministry. One simply cannot find any support, either in the New Testament or in early church history for today’s professional clergy and specialized church buildings’.

By contrast, the ubiquitous sermon, delivered by a trained clergyman in a specialized church building most often acts as a deskilling agent. ‘By using the regular sermon the preacher proclaims each week, not in words, but in the clearest manner possible, that, be the congregation ever so gifted, there is present, for that period, one who is more gifted and all must attend in silence upon him (less often her). . . Sadly, competent preachers may create dependence more effectively than incompetent ones. This means, ironically, that in the long run competent sermons may be more damaging than indifferent ones!’

And then, these two devastating paragraphs, sheeted home to the practice of preaching: ‘Yet today, in spite of exceptions, the individual Christian is often excessively busy and unused to reflection, unskilled in prayer, more concerned with doing than becoming, lacking in understanding of the relevance of the faith to nearly all aspects of life, ignorant of the past, anti-intellectual, materialistic, welded to the secular thought of the day, timid in the face of social and political injustice, barely capable even of recognizing the enemies of God (or his friends), lacking in steady and forgiving love and deficient in the skills required to detect nonsense—a living monument denying the assertion of Jesus that ‘I came that they may have life and may have it abundantly.’ (John 10: 10 RV). As sociologist Jacques Ellul observes, far from being a model of freedom, most Christians are models of mediocre bondage, simultaneously the slaves of the latest fad and the ecclesiastical and humanistic traditions in which they were reared. The disastrous consequence is that the non-Christian world experiences little Christian influence in any area of thought and has little, if any, understanding of the essence of biblical Christianity.

Christianity is thus inexorably pushed to the margins of society. The end-product is social decay, a rise of unbelief, an increase in cults and non-Christian religions, depression and failure, among Christians, a tarnished reputation for the church as a whole and the wrath and the judgment of God.

And yet, there are even those who assert that preaching has a sacramental quality about it. ‘Preaching is not just a word about Christ; it is a word of Christ’. Uhh? ‘We are asked to believe that when the clergyman (our modern professional replacement for the plurality of elders in the New Testament church) in the dedicated church building (as opposed to in homes as was the practice in New Testament times) mounts the pulpit (that elevated fixture introduced in the 3rd century) and addresses a passive audience (who were not passive in the New Testament) or “laity” (a designation added long after New Testament times) in the pews (13th century addition) via the regular sermon (which did not exist in New Testament practice) then and only then is the event especially pleasing to God, who responds with a special, if not unique channel of his grace.’

I maintain, therefore, that sermons today should be delivered to the same sort of audience as they were in the first century — to unbelievers in an evangelistic context — and NOT to believers in a church setting.

Respected New Testament scholar Richard Hays, in ‘The Moral Vision of the New Testament’ affirms that the growth to maturity of the church has nothing to do with sermons. He puts it as well as anyone when he writes ‘Ephesians 4:1–5:20 presents a visionary description of the character of the reconciled community. The diverse gifts in the church have as their common purpose “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ until all of us come to the unity of the faith and…to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (4:12–13). Thus, as in 1 Corinthians 12, ministry is conceived as the work of the entire community, not of a specially designated class of spiritually gifted persons. The interplay of gifts in the church is designed to bring the community as a whole to full maturity, so that the church might ultimately stand unambiguously as “the body of Christ,” the complete embodiment of Christ in the world.’