Couldn't Help Noticing

Mission improbable

Photo: Matthias Media's crack evangelistic team photographed in the Rose Garden as they prepare to storm the White House. Don't let the smiles fool you; they are intent on taking no spiritual prisoners, and Tony Payne is holding 250 Two Ways to Live tracts behind his back.

L to R: Claire Sweeney, Abby Sweeney, Helen Jensen, Marty Sweeney (US Ministry Director), Tony Payne (Publishing Director) and Phillip Jensen (Founder).

Prayer request

Can I ask you to join us in praying for the inaugural Matthias Media USA conference, which is being held this week (Tuesday to Thursday) at Capitol Hill Baptist in Washington DC. We are expecting around 300 pastors and lay leaders to attend.

Please pray for the speakers: Phillip Jensen, Tony Payne and Mark Dever, the pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist. Please pray for their safety and health. Pray that what they say will be biblical, and that it will spur and encourage the conference attendees to faithful ministry, and provide a fresh vision for ‘gospel growth’. (View full program for the conference.) Pray that the conference attendees will be greatly encouraged and challenged.

Please also pray for those who are looking after the administrative details of the conference. In particular, please pray for our USA ministry director, Marty Sweeney. Pray that all runs smoothly.

Phillip and his wife Helen then head off to the UK for more speaking engagements which I'm sure they would value prayer for. Tony heads back home to Sydney. Please pray for their safety and ask that God would grant them a quick recovery from their tiring overseas schedules.

Faith in ... ?

The front page headline of my local newspaper (Northside Courier, 24 October 2007) caught my eye the other day: ‘Reilly to put faith in voters’. Here's an extract:

Willoughby Mayor Pat Reilly says he will vote according to the majority's view—even if it flies in the face of his staunch Catholicism—if he is elected as senator next month.

The long-time councillor, who said he still plans to run for re-election as mayor in 2008, was announced as the first candidate for the Senator OnLine (SOL) Party last week. SOL is the country's first internet-based party, which will make its decisions based purely on the results of online polls.

As part of SOL's constitution, Cr Reilly has undertaken to vote according to the majority result of the party's web-based opinion polls and abstain when there is no clear result ...

Asked if he would be willing to vote for the majority even if it went against his Catholic beliefs, Cr Reilly said that while it could be with regret that he would have to step away from his “core beliefs”, he would because he “has faith in Australians”.

But what if the majority's view is, for example, for the decriminalisation of drugs?

“God help us if that's the case. But at least it encourages people to get into the line of debate,” he said.

No doubt you can anticipate some of the questions I want to raise in response.

Firstly, why is Reilly referred to as a “staunch Catholic”? (Why—apart from the fact that “staunch Catholic” is such a standard journalistic expression!) My dictionary defines ‘staunch’ as “loyal and committed in attitude”, so using the adjective ‘staunch’ in this situation seems somewhat inaccurate.

Secondly, can any lawyers out there tell me the answer to the following question: isn't it illegal for a person or organization to seek to bond an elected parliamentarian to vote a particular way as the SOL are seeking to do? (Remember the fuss caused in the NSW Parliament when some thought that Archbishop Pell was trying to influence the vote of MPs.)

Thirdly, Reilly's attitude seems a long way removed from the example of the Apostle Peter, upon whom his Catholic Church was founded. When faced with a similar choice in Acts 5:29, Peter says simply: “We must obey God rather than men”.

Finally, does not Reilly's response seem strange, considering the position he has put himself into? Having committed himself to a course of ignoring God's divine wisdom, it does seem slightly problematic to cry “God help us”!

What is scholarship?

The Moore College library is a wonderful place to get some serious reading, thinking and writing done. It's also a great place to be distracted by far too many interesting books.

Just the other day I took John Piper's What Jesus demands from the world down from the shelf and, while browsing his excellent introduction and ‘word to biblical scholars’, came across these words from Adolf Schlatter:

I keep myself as free as possible from conjectures and avoid therefore the effort to overturn them. This does not seem like a fruitful business to me. For conjectures are not overturned by producing more of the same. They sink away when one sees that observation is more fruitful than conjecture ... I call Wissenschaft [scholarship] the observation of what exists, not the attempt to imagine what is not visible. Perhaps one will object that the guesswork of conjecture excites and entertains while observation is hard and difficult work. But the Gospel is misunderstood when one makes a plaything out of it.

This, it seems to me, summarizes not only the scholar's task, but the task of all teachers and preachers, and the task of all Christians. The task is to observe what is in the word of God, to act upon it, and to tell others about it.

Observation is hard and demanding work. It is much easier to preach and act upon what you think is the case or should be the case or must be the case, rather than what is the case when we closely attend to what the real existent word of God says.

The Word is not our plaything to conjecture with. It is reality that exists. Our job is to observe and proclaim and obey what exists.

And speaking of pragmatism

Under the startling headline ‘Willow Creek Repents?’, the ‘Out of Ur’ blog talks about the latest moves of the Chicago-based mega-church to reach its people more effectively.

The ‘repentance’ involved is the discovery by Willow Creek that some of the core assumptions and methods of their ministry over the past 20 years are simply not working, and that they need to go back to a clean sheet of paper to question how they are ‘doing church’. Executive Pastor Greg Hawkins explains in an online video presentation that a sneaking feeling had been building for some time in his heart that something was wrong—that Willow Creek wasn't using its resources in the best way to help its people.

So he did what any good evangelical pastor would do: he went back to his Bible to check and reaffirm what Christian ministry was all about, and prayed. Well no, that's not quite what he did. He conducted a detailed survey of his people to find out whether they thought their spiritual needs were being met by the programmes of the church, and whether their participation in Willow Creek was actually helping them to grow or not.

The results of the survey, which were replicated in 30 other churches which also did the survey, were “earth-shaking” and “mind-blowing”, according to senior pastor Bill Hybels, and “the wake-up call” of his adult life.

What did they discover that was so earth-shattering? Simply that increasing participation in church programmes—such as worship services, Bible classes, small groups, and serving—did not predict increasing levels of devotion to Christ.

This was mind-blowing for the Willow Creekers because, as Greg Hawkins explains, their whole model of ministry has been built on increasing participation rates in church programmes in the belief that this would lead to increased spiritual growth. Their key measurable (as the business types would put it) was participation. Get people involved and doing something, and they will stay in your church and grow. This is a basic church growth rule.

Except that it wasn't working:

Some of the stuff that we have put millions of dollars into thinking it would really help our people grow and develop spiritually, when the data actually came back it wasn't helping people that much. Other things that we didn't put that much money into and didn't put much staff against is stuff our people are crying out for. (Bill Hybels)

As a result, Willow Creek is embarking on a massive new collaborative research programme involving 500 volunteer churches to find out exactly what it is that will bring true spiritual growth to people. Hawkins says:

Our dream is that we fundamentally change the way we do church. That we take out a clean sheet of paper and we rethink all of our old assumptions. Replace it with new insights. Insights that are informed by research and rooted in Scripture. Our dream is really to discover what God is doing and how he's asking us to transform this planet.

One can only hope that good things come out of this. Some of the new Willow ideas—for example, that believers should be taught how to read the Bible themselves, and become ‘self-feeders’—are welcome (but not completely original!) insights.

However, while I suppose all this could be classed as ‘repentance’ in one sense (they are turning away from one set of programmes and looking for another), it is really a change in tactics, not a change in basic method and approach. The what and how of ministry are still being determined by market research and analysis of ‘the data’. The new insights will be “informed by research and rooted in Scripture”, Greg Hawkins says, but “rooted in Scripture” appears to mean simply that they don't plan to do anything downright unscriptural.

The essay on pragmatism that I mentioned in my last post on this subject, which was published in The Briefing about eight years ago, observed this about the Willow Creek approach to the Bible and ministry:

In church growth literature, the Bible seems only to provide very broad parameters for actions (such as the basic task at hand to see people saved), but doesn't have much active role in shaping or grounding the ministry. What really drives the ministry comes from elsewhere—from management models, demographic analysis, research, experiment, common sense, sociology, psychology, or whatever. Certainly in Hybels's case, he makes no secret of his debt to management gurus like Peter Drucker, to current theories of pop-psychology, and to basic textbook principles of modern image-management and marketing.

Nothing has changed. While it's extremely admirable for Willow Creek to admit that things aren't working and to go back to the blank sheet of paper, it won't be the Bible's view of ministry that determines what gets written on that paper. It will be yet more survey data and analysis to find out what the ‘market’ really wants and needs so that they can be given it.

The management-driven, utilitarian approach to ministry will always be like this. We can only look forward to the next wake-up call in 15 years' time when whatever new programme they come up with this time also comes under the dread judgement of “it's just not working”.