One-on-One with Michael Moynagh on “Church in Life”
Ed: Why a book on Church in Life?
Michael: We hear much today about disciples making disciples and about Christians living out their faith in everyday life. But gather-and-scatter church makes this difficult.
We gather for worship and scatter as individuals for the rest of the week. Having worshipped, we practice our faith largely on our own—at work, in our hobbies and interests, and among friends who don’t attend church. And it is not always easy to be a Christian witness on your own.
A large company made a substantial number of people redundant. A group of Christians paid for a consultant to give free advice to each person losing their job. (Colleagues said, “These Christians are better than our HR department!”). This would have been very difficult for a Christian to arrange alone.
Time and again, missional discipleship requires that Christians be organised. Church in Life is about innovative ways for Christians to get organised to change their worlds.
Ed: So what’s the secret?
Michael: A new missional movement is emerging in the U.K., elsewhere in Europe, in parts of the United States and Canada, in Australia, and now Africa.
Christians get together in small groups, listen to people who don’t go to church, find simple ways to love and serve them, build relationships with them, share the gospel sensitively, help them to become a Christian community right where they are, and then encourage them to repeat the process in their own way.
A growing number of these communities are emerging in gyms and cafes around interests ranging from surfing to making cards, in old apartment blocks and new neighborhoods, among young and older people, and among poor people and the more affluent.
What’s fascinating is that, increasingly, these new communities are part of the mainline churches. New and existing forms of church live alongside each other.
Some people call these communities ‘fresh expressions of church’, a term coined in the U.K. For me, they are just new Christian communities in everyday life.
Ed: So are they a new type of church planting?
Michael: Some of their roots are in church planting. In areas where fewer and fewer people go to church, church planters have struggled with their traditional methods.
They haven’t been able to launch a new congregation quickly because people have lost interest in Christian worship. So planters have had to spend longer building relationships with individuals and sharing the gospel with them.
Doing this one by one is time consuming. So planters began to think, Can’t we gather people together instead, build community with them, and as our relationships deepen, share the gospel with them as a group?
They then asked, “What would bring people together?” The solution was to find simple ways of loving and serving them. They next asked, “But how do we know what form of loving service to offer?” The answer was to prayerfully listen to the people they were called to serve, and through the Spirit to identify how best to add quality to their lives.
So this new way of mission emerged: listen, find simple ways to love and serve people, build community with them, share the gospel, invite them to form a Christian community where they are, and equip them to repeat the process in their own way.
We then discovered that virtually any Christian could do this! Almost anyone could get together with one or two other Christians and follow this journey.
Ed: That’s very different to church planting in large teams. Can you give an example?
Michael: Take Louisa. She was a community nurse working in a medical practice in England’s East Midlands. She knew that an unusually high proportion of young mothers had postnatal depression.
She mentioned this to Charlie and Charlotte, who lived in the neighborhood. During the conversation, the idea emerged of inviting the mothers and their young children to Charlie and Charlotte’s home once a week. The mothers could form a support group, with Louisa in attendance.
It soon became clear that the mothers would value meeting for mutual support without their children. So they were invited to a regular evening meeting, were offered a menu of formats, and the mothers decided to watch a video about lives that had been changed by God. Step by step, this group then evolved into a new form of church.
If you had asked Louisa to plant a church, she would have run a mile! But start a support group as part of being a community nurse was easy. It did not require lots of extra time and work. It added value to what she was already doing.
That is what is so brilliant about this new type of mission! It can enhance believers’ everyday lives.
Ed: So this is really a new form of discipleship?
Michael: Absolutely. Instead of being a disciple on your own, you find simple ways of following Jesus in a passion of your life, with other Christians.
How better to grow in your faith than to be on mission, in a part of life that matters to you, with other Christians, for Jesus? This is the best way of making further disciples.
Ed: Is this what your book is all about?
Michael: What we are discovering is not just a new way of following Jesus, but a whole new way of thinking about the church. Communal life with Jesus is God’s gift to the world, and Christians are called to join God in offering this communal life to others.
When you start with God’s generosity, everything changes, not least, how you see the church. The implications are far-reaching and massively exciting!
Ed Stetzer holds the Billy Graham Distinguished Chair of Church, Mission, and Evangelism at Wheaton College, is executive director of the Billy Graham Center, and publishes church leadership resources through Mission Group.
The Exchange is a part of CT's
Blog Forum. Support the work of CT.
Subscribe and get one year free.
The views of the blogger do not necessarily reflect those of Christianity Today.
