Total Church

This book by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis was one I've been meaning to read for years while somehow simultaneously feeling like doing so would be largely redundant, as its two authors were the founding elders of the church I grew up in, and therefore its theology had already broadly been thoroughly absorbed by my adolescent self in the form of a life's worth of sermons, pastoral care & conversation, and even hymns (written by Tim).
   Glad to say - reading it was a highly rewarding experience even if not particularly insightful in the sense of exposing me to new forms of presentation or argument about what the gospel is and how it does, or should, work - the premise is simple: if churches are intentional communities centred around the gospel, then that gospel is manifest in both the content (words of truth around which those church communities are unified) and the mission (actions & life-patterns within this community springing from those truths, which are to be shared in the wider world and affect every element of life). According to the blurb comments, this book was apparently considered 'provocative' when it came out - but reading it over a decade down the road it's a wonderful testament to the robustness of post-Christendom evangelical missiology that it basically echoes (or rather pre-echoes) mostly the same kind of ground that I would consider hegemonic in the field, albeit without becoming academic or wishy-washily impractical (as some texts can, maybe, be criticized of doing). The book itself is extremely readable, and draws helpfully on both biblical underpinnings to their ideas and experiential examples of things working out in contemporary efforts. After an introductory pair of chapters exploring what 'gospel' and 'community' mean in this context and the particular challenges of pursuing the fullest overlap of the two (which is what a church, in the total sense, is meant to be), Tim and Steve then apply this robustly simple framework to various areas of Christian living - including evangelism, social involvement, church planting and world mission, discipleship and training, pastoral care, spirituality, theology and apologetics, children and young people, and how we conceptualize success.
   There could be much more to unpack from the ideas presented in this book - but since this is not presented as a manifesto, rather an ascertainment of the way church already is (or at least is meant to be), the parameters discussed in here may be flexible enough to be readily applied to anything not covered here. Overall I think most Christian readers would find helpful food for thought in here, in terms of approaches to missional living and community particularly, and would recommend this book to believers looking for workable roadmaps to keep their witness relevant while rooted together in the gospel.

Multiplying Churches

This book, edited by Steve Timmis, is a short and readable collection of essays on the broad theme of church-planting. My church is very much a church-planting church by its nature and intentionality, and so everyone in it was given a copy of this a few months ago to help us generally think and talk and pray through corporately how to go ahead with an upcoming pair of new church-plants. I can say straight-up that it's a great book for this; each chapter is accessible, jargon-free, biblically-grounded, and thoroughly proactive and exhortational in style - I won't discuss it in much depth here, because I'm currently also reading another book more centrally focused on a holistic exploration of biblical theology of church, and I'll save reflections for the post on that.

   But yes - the chapters:

• Tim Chester - church planting as the work of spreading Christ's light
• Henri Blocher - church planting as the work of a renewed humanity in Creation
• Steve Timmis - church planting as the work of God's people witnessing to Him
• Matt Chandler - the motive of grace
• Reuben Hunter - the method of Word-centredness
• Matt Chandler - the means of empowerment by the Holy Spirit
• One Mokgatle - how churches can/should transcend ethno-cultural boundaries
• Steve Timmis - men's role in church planting
• Ruth Woodrow - women's role in church planting

   Overall, a great book to work through in church communities facing upcoming plants (or not - yet it might even inspire one!)

   Regular readers (ahahahahaha who?) may suspect, rightly, that I do have some thoughts on the last pair of chapters which I haven't divulged in this post - and that's because, to put it quite honestly, I have been convicted in recent months about the extent to which my social/political consciousness is allowed priority over my life in Christ (which then necessarily entails a degree of accountability and humility toward the body of Christ which is the church) to determine my opinions and reactions to things. And that's not to say that I'm still far from in agreement with many of the senior leadership (in both my church and the wider Acts 29 network of which it is a part) on the issue of gender roles (the thoughts I laid out here are still basically what I think), but I recognise that such arguments aren't as neat as I'd've liked to think. My uptake of support for feminism was rooted in hearing and reading the experiences and reflections of women, talking about the oppressions they faced; and while I'm not convinced the church isn't complicit in this to a significant degree (especially considered historically), I also have to recognise that there are many wise and socially-conscious women in the church who accept the seniors' position on gender roles (in a nutshell - complementarianism, so men-only-leaders), and that doesn't end the argument, but in humility creates new space for constructive discussions about where to go from there. I don't know. We're in an interesting period of political and cultural shift regarding gender norms, as we also are regarding the role of traditionally hegemonic religion: my personal opinions aren't as important as the wider attempts by the church to seek unity for all in Christ, which won't be overly aided if the whole church is busy arguing internally about the finer shades of theological nuance in this or that egalitarian theory, or where we draw the line between being subversive in a Spirit/grace-led sense and just being downright subversive. I wish I could explore these avenues further because trust me I've got views - but so what? Maybe some day there will come a time and a place for these conversations between the secular, the philosophical, and the church to take place, with all degrees of no-holds-barred criticality alongside an earnest intention to find workable common ground: and if or when that day comes, I will spring into action and try to help radical feminists and complementarian church leaders realise where their concerns overlap - or whatever else may come about. But until such hypothetical scenarios arise, I am not complacent, but merely refraining from unhelpful or divisive arguments.
   Let dialectics get on with themselves.
   You just get on with being.

The World We All Want

This book, a short introduction to Christianity written by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, is a great resource for doing its job, something it does with aplomb and regularity in church circles I'm used to. (It probably helps that both of its authors are both of the founding leaders of my church but it's caught on elsewhere too.) 'TWWAW' (pronounced 'idk') for short, rather than the kind of book you can give to a non-christian and expect them to engage well with it (they might, but only if they've already got a vague familiarity with what Christian-ness: a better resource for letting someone read as an introduction would be 3-2-1), it's designed as seven studies, observing a passage of scripture and running some investigative questions, best worked through in small group discussions. I've just finished going through it with a handful of seekers, as I was one of the supporting facilitators in the studies - not that it needed much, as if led by someone who knows Christianity well, TWWAW pretty much drives all the sessions itself. It's structured around the whole biblical narrative, from creation to fall to redemption to new creation, tracing how Jesus succeeded the various transitional steps required to complete this progress that Israel failed at. It's well biblically grounded but doesn't go into a huge amount of theological depth, which makes it very accessible, but it does have the potential for the sheer massiveness of the story presented and the well-poised questions invoking responses from seeker readers to prompt questions that do go into considerable depth (which is why it's probably advisable to have a pretty experienced Christian leading this study, rather than just giving the books out). Anyway - as a resource that I've seen many a time over the last decade prove its effectiveness in communicating the gospel and linking it well to individual concerns about God and sin and such, I wholeheartedly recommend TWWAW for any Christians to use in study groups with friends who are seeking, and pray that in any such efforts God uses these well-structured little studies to bring people closer to the truth.