Speaking Truth to Power - Updated

You can now watch video of President Zuma at Godfirst church.

Here he is being interviewed by Sibs Sibanda and being presented with a sword and receiving prayer. (Its worth checking out the other interviews as well - especially the one with Nelson Mandela's former bodyguard.)

And here is PJ's message.

Speaking Truth to Power

On Sunday evening PJ Smyth had the awesome responsibility of preaching at Godfirst church in front of the President of South Africa, Jacob Zuma. He did a great job! You can read a transcript of the sermon here, or listen to it here.

Every time we get up to preach we are speaking before the king of king's, or, as PJ put it, before the 'president's president'; so we ought to feel a sense of awe about the task of preaching, rather than see it as something routine or mundane. Having an earthly head of state in the front row must add a certain piquancy to the preaching experience though.

PJ's three points were a good, solid, exposition of the biblical attitude towards secular power:
1. I have made you the President of South Africa
2. Anticipate submissive and prayerful followership by Christ-following South Africans
3. In view of me appointing you, lead confidently and humbly

Most of us will never have a president or prime minister come to our church, but let's all pray for those in authority, in recognition of the One from whom all authority flows.

Going Multi, Part 7

Conclusion

Overall, I would suggest that Piper’s four points are all necessary for a church, but am not quite convinced that even when taken together they are sufficient for a church.

Pragmatically I am convinced of multi – it just makes sense at so many levels, and I think it is probably how we will go at Gateway at some point (doing multi-site that is - we're already multi-service). But theologically there are questions we should not be afraid to ask.

In some ways there are more questions than answers… However, as a compromise position I like this recent explanation by Tim Keller of the approach to multi at Redeemer:

1. First, we sent our services out into different locations so that people could worship closer to where they lived. People can become more deeply involved in the community and can more easily bring friends if they attend services in their neighborhood. This was an ‘anti-mega-church’ move, since huge churches create a large body of commuters who travel long distances to attend church. We wanted to resist this tendency and root people more in their locales.

2. Second, the multi-site model is a transition design for us. Redeemer has a timetable for turning each site into a congregation in its own neighborhood, with its own pastoral leadership. I was the main preacher at all sites, but two years ago we went from four to five services at three sites, which is too many for me to preach in a Sunday. Rather than beaming me in by video, we determined that other pastors on the staff would always preach at least that fifth service. When we get to six and seven services, about two years from now, each site will have its own Lead Pastor who will share the preaching with me.

We will then transition from a ‘multi-site’ to a ‘collegiate’ model. Though still under one unified board of elders, each church will have its own pastoral team, elder team, and set of lay leaders.

But then Keller is a Presbyterian, so of course he ends up with a presbytery!

There is also the question of the sacraments, and church discipline, that Piper doesn’t reference at all in his four tests of what defines a church. I am sure we would not want to ignore these issues. And on the flip side, there is the reality that for many people (including elders) the Sunday meeting is what defines the church – should it?

In conclusion, I see no definitive reason to oppose multi, and there are many things to commend it, but at the same time there is good reason to be cautious.

In order to help those churches that are considering going multi, with some friends from the Newfrontiers Theology Forum, I came up with the following checklist of questions to consider…

• What is your motivation for going multi?
• Are you going multi as a strategy, or because you have to (E.g., because of limited seating capacity)?
• What are your non-negotiables about the church? What can change?
• Will going multi result in a split along ethnic/age/class lines between the meetings/venues? Is this a problem or not? Why? How will you express ‘one new man’?
• Will going multi result in a squeeze on service time/ministry? How will you handle this?
• How will the elders personally reproduce their lives in the church? Is this important to you?
• Where are the lines (relational distance and geographic distance) which when crossed would mean that this can no longer be defined as one church?
• Will you ever gather everyone together? How? When?
• How will you express unity? What does unity mean to you?
• Is the ‘main meeting’ the defining element of your church, or is there some other measure you would use in preference?
• Is your plan to eventually develop autonomous congregations or to maintain linked campuses?
• Will your use video preaching? If so, what are your motives in doing this?
• How will preaching be applied to the life of the congregation?
• What will be the impact of going multi on your involvement in church planting?
• How will you stay open to the Spirit and not just do repeat meetings?
• How will you practice the sacraments?
• How will you practice church discipline?

Going Multi, Part 6

Is Multi Biblical? Contd.

2. A unity of teaching
Does this really make a church? As Matt Chandler puts it,

After studying the issue, we decided to go multi-site. Yet we still have some serious concerns and questions about the multi-site idea even as we participate in it. The problem that haunts us is a simple one. Where does this idea lead? Where does this end? Twenty years from now are there fifteen preachers in the United States?

The biblical instructions about the role of elders would indicate that elders in situ are to teach their congregations:

This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every town as I directed you… He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it. (Titus 1:5-9)

The average Joe might prefer to listen to a Driscoll or a Virgo than to me, and technology now means that they can, but is that necessarily healthy? Or biblically appropriate?

A consideration of this point and the previous one might drive us towards the conclusion that generally our churches should be small, and pastored and preached to by elders who know the congregation as a father knows his family.


3. A unity of philosophy of ministry
Again, this would seem a necessary but not sufficient totem of church identity. A whole movement or network of churches can share a philosophy of ministry, but that does not make them one church.


4. Very significant clusters of relationships that are biblically life-giving and involve all of the "one another" commands of the Bible
I think most of us would say “Amen” to this, but how many multi churches actually manage to pull it off? And is there the danger that in pursuing this we end up with a fragmentation of the church rather than an all-together-ness?

It does seem that in the NT whole churches met together, and that to some extent at least it was this meeting-together-ness that defined the church. It is in Acts and 1 Corinthians that we are given the most details about how the church met, and there it is epi to auto (in the same place):

1 Cor 11:18-20
For, in the first place, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you. And I believe it in part, for there must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized. When you come together, it is not the Lord’s supper that you eat.

1 Cor 14:23
If, therefore, the whole church comes together and all speak in tongues, and outsiders or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are out of your minds?

Acts 2:44
And all who believed were together and had all things in common.

Acts 5:12
Now many signs and wonders were regularly done among the people by the hands of the apostles. And they were all together in Solomon’s Portico.

Acts 6:1-2
Now in these days when the disciples were increasing in number, a complaint by the Hellenists arose against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution. And the twelve summoned the full number of the disciples and said, "It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables.

Acts 15:22
Then it seemed good to the apostles and the elders, with the whole church, to choose men from among them and send them to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas.

So it would appear that in Jerusalem and Corinth the whole congregation gathered together. The Jerusalem church was presumably a large one, while the church at Corinth seems to have been small (judging by Paul’s comment to the Romans [16:23], written from Corinth that, “Gaius, who is host to me and to the whole church, greets you.” Archaeological evidence suggests that even the larger Corinthian home would have been unable to accommodate more than 70 people). If this is the case, then small groups are only part of the answer, and not the whole story.

But it is debateable as to how much we can read in to the Acts accounts of the Jerusalem church gathering together. The data is limited and hard to be definitive about.

For instance, what does the Acts 2:46 description of the church “attending the temple together” mean? Did the Jerusalem church really all meet together in the temple? Surely the temple authorities would not have allowed believers to meet together; certainly not for what we would recognize as Christian worship. The argument could be made that this might be language used in a similar way to how we might say, “I met with the church” if we happened to bump into ten church members at the shops. However, whatever went on in their meeting together, that they did meet together was in some way defining for the Jerusalem church.

It would seem very odd to dispute that when Acts 2:1 records, “they were all together in one place” it means anything other than they were all together in one place. The similarity of this phrase to that in Acts 5:12, “they were all together in Solomon’s Portico” [NIV: “all the believers used to meet together in Solomon’s Colonnade”] is a clear indication that the Jerusalem church did indeed continue to meet all together, at the same time and in the same place, until the persecution broke out, even if they were not having a ‘worship meeting’.

Of course, the question that must then be asked is to what degree the meeting habits of the Jerusalem church are prescriptive or merely descriptive. To me, the evidence from Corinth, and Acts 15:22 (after the persecution associated with Stephen) clearly suggests a pattern of the whole church meeting all together at the same time and in the same place that was normative in the NT churches.

Going Multi, Part 5

Is Multi Biblical? contd.

1. A unity of eldership
We have a strong emphasis upon eldership but do we overemphasize eldership at the expense of the congregation?

Are we in danger in the multi model of making eldership unity the thing whereas biblically it might be argued that ekklesia unity is the thing? In emphasising an important part are we in danger of missing the essential whole? Do we define the church around the unity of the leaders, or around the community of believers? We need to recognize that defining unity around leadership moves us towards the Roman Catholic position where the church is defined by the Pope and his bishops. Is this where we want to go?!

Arguably, churches (NB not ‘church plants’!) in the New Testament existed before eldership was set in place. The example from Paul’s instructions to Titus on Crete makes it plain that churches need elders, but that churches can be churches even when leadership is not in place. This would suggest that unity of the congregation rather than unity of the elders should be our measuring stick for determining when a church exists.

There is then the question of once elders are set in place, to what extent they need to know their congregations. Is it sufficient for elders to be united in their eldership team, or do they really need to know the members of the congregation, especially if it is congregational unity more than eldership unity that defines a church? The multi response to this tends to be along the lines that once a church grows above some arbitrary figure (150? 300?) the elders cannot have meaningful relationship with every member of the congregation anyway, so does it make any difference if the church goes multi. In fact, it may mean increased eldership knowledge of the members if the individual sites/meetings are broken down into groups of +/-150. But then the counterargument to that would be that in effect these smaller gatherings are actually fully fledged churches, and should be regarded as such.

And round and round it goes…

Another consideration is what happens about discipleship and discipline? If someone migrates from one meeting/site where they are under the covering of one particular group of elders to another meeting/site is this not just as much an issue as someone leaving one church and going to another? Does multi in fact encourage a lessening of commitment by making it easier for someone to float from site to site?

What we can say in all this is that defining what elders are and do is key. Clearly, elders need to know the flock but this doesn’t mean every elder needs to know everyone in the congregation. What is must mean is that there is an impartation of the elders life (“You know my ways among you”) to the congregation, as well as teaching, and this must be difficult if no-one knows the elder personally.

How we think about eldership will shape how we do multi, and there is clearly a danger in moving towards a corporation model of church. It is a problem when shepherds no longer want to shepherd and when the elders are relieved to be relieved of personal pastoral responsibility!

Going Multi, Part 4

Is Multi Biblical?

John Piper has summed up the theological/ecclesiological arguments in favour of going multi like this:

I think the essence of biblical church community and unity hangs on a unity of eldership, a unity of teaching, and a unity of philosophy of ministry. And then, within the church, it hangs on very significant clusters of relationships that are biblically life-giving and involve all of the "one another" commands of the Bible. And you do these in some kind of smaller gathering, call it "small groups," "cell groups," "fellowship groups," "shepherding groups," "mid-sized Sunday school classes" or whatever. Those are the places where you get to know people and where you get to fulfill the biblical commands of community.


Is this apologetic biblically sound?

What is a church?
Many of us are probably happy with Calvin’s definition of a church being,

Wherever we see the word of God sincerely preached and heard, wherever we see the sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, there we cannot have any doubt that the Church of God has some existence.

As implied in Calvin’s ‘some existence’, these things are necessary but not sufficient for the identification of a church. The question for us is whether a church doing multi really is a church, or if going multi actually creates multiple churches rather than one church in several places. (NB I wonder how different our discussions on a whole range of ecclesiastical issues would be if our Bibles followed Luther and Tyndale in translating ekklesia as ‘congregation’ rather than ‘church’?)

As one of the authors of the 9Marks ejournal expresses it:

In one sentence, let me put it like this: (1) the advocates of a multi-site or multi- service model functionally use the word "church" like my wife and I refer to ourselves as one "family"; (2) they biblically justify their functional use of the word in this fashion like one might refer to different branches of a bank as one bank; (3) but what they really are is McDonalds, that is, they are different churches which comprise nothing more than one corporate entity, which they are misnaming a "church," as if we were to begin referring to all McDonalds restaurants collectively as a "restaurant."

To return to the two multi-site proof texts in Acts, I'm happy to say that the church in Jerusalem is still the "church" when they are spread out from house to house, just like I would say a basketball team is still a team even when its members are spending the night in different rooms or cities. But I'm happy to say that for the basketball team because, at some point, they will come together and do that which constitutes a basketball team. Likewise, in Acts 2 you have the church coming together in the temple to do that which constitutes them as a church, and then scattering to break bread and share fellowship in smaller groups. Fine. They're still constituted as a church not by what they do when they're scattered, but by what they do when they're together. Then in Acts 8, you simply have a statement about Paul going from house to house and persecuting the members of the Jerusalem church, just as if you said something like, "The coach went from room to room, alerting the team that basketball game had been postponed." That strikes me as the plainest reading of Acts 8 (and apparently Christians have read it that way for 2000 years). What's strange about the multi-site and multi-service church is that they are happy to do away with "gathering" as one component of what it means to constitute a church, even though there's clear biblical evidence that the Jerusalem church all gathered—yes, all thousands of them (see Acts 2:44; 5:12; 6:1-2)! It sounds as if the multi-site and multi-service advocates point to these passages to say that their "team" (church) is a "team" even though they never gather as a "team" because being a team has nothing to do with getting together. But is that what these two passages teach? Couldn't it be the case that it's whatever the Jerusalem church is doing together that constitutes them as a team?

To help us bore down on this some more, in the next post I will take Piper’s apologetic clause by clause, and make some brief observations/questions.

Going Multi, Part 3

Newfrontiers and Multi, Part 2

The situation now
A number of us were looking seriously at multi before Driscoll came to the Together on a Mission Conference, in Brighton in 2008, but it was his comments in the elders seminars which really lit the blue touch paper. Driscoll seemed to strike just at the moment when we ready to hear what he had to say. After all, many of us had seen multi before, without being impacted by it in the same way. For example, a gang of us went to Singapore to visit Lawrence Khong’s church back in 1999, but because we were focussing on what he was doing with cells we hardly noticed that he was also doing multi.

It is probably worth considering why we were ready to hear what Driscoll had to say at this moment. A concern raised about ging multi is that it can have the effect of limiting space for the charismatic. Being multi almost inevitably means that our corporate gatherings have to be shorter and sharper. Maybe ten or twenty years ago we would have resisted this, but over the past five years or so an increased emphasis on mission means that many churches have already taken the philosophical decision to make meetings shorter and sharper in a desire to reach out to the unbelieving guest. Having already done this, we were in a position to accept the constraints that multi implies.

In this regard, multi-venue, with only one meeting per venue, might offer us a better model than multi-meeting – this would offer the benefits of increased meeting options, but avoid the problem of always watching the clock.

Whatever the philosophical and spiritual issues involved, pragmatically there was just so much sense in what the Seattle dynamo said: Why spend millions (and in most towns in the UK it is millions) buying a building that seats 1,000 when for far less cash and stress you could stay in your existing facility but run two or three meetings? Why always plant a church, with the huge attrition rate upon planters, when you can just open another campus and enjoy all the economies of scale that brings? Why dilute ministry gift if there are some star performers who can serve across a number of meetings?

It all made perfect sense! And as a result a number of our churches are actively moving towards multi-site.

Also, many more of us (Gateway included) are now doing multi-meeting.

The outstanding example of this move in Newfrontiers is Godfirst, Johannesburg. At the time of writing Godfirst has just gone to ten meetings across seven venues and is gathering a total crowd approaching 2,000 people. Godfirst is also utilizing technology, in that PJ Smyth is ‘preaching’ via DVD at a number of these meetings. (PJ’s explanation for why Godfirst has gone multi can be found here)

The trickle-down effect is very real in church leadership, so it is likely that more of our leaders will pick-up on the successes of PJ, Driscoll, et al, and see multi as the latest silver bullet to make all their dreams-of-growth come true. I fear that rather than being the silver bullet, for some this will be a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot bullet, which it would be good to avoid.

In the next post I will try to do some theology on the multi model.

Going Multi, Part 2

Newfrontiers and Multi

Multiple ‘congregations’
Sidcup, Brighton and Vineyard (as Jubilee, Cape Town, was then known) certainly used this method in the late 1980s (and there may be others I am unaware of). Under this model, the church met in congregations that were geographically defined. In many ways what was happening at this time was very close to what many multi-siters are now doing. What was different from a Piper/Driscoll type model is that the individual congregations were led by elders who preached in their congregations, rather than having one preacher serving multiple locations. Also, as I recall, these preaching elders were not even necessarily preaching the same text/theme, but were free to set their own agenda, and in this sense were operating far more as autonomous churches.

The other distinguishing factor was that the model these churches were operating under was Cell-Congregation-Celebration. London’s Icthus church/churches were the most consistent advocates of this model in the UK, and for some time these ideas gained traction with us. Practically what this meant was that the whole church would gather together on a regular basis for a celebration meeting. At Brighton, that meant regular gatherings in the Dome, or Hove Town Hall. At Vineyard, it meant meeting in congregations in the morning, and as a whole church in the evening.

(Personally, the eight months I spent at Vineyard in 1989 was one of the happiest periods of church involvement I have experienced – part of a small group that was genuinely fun and spiritually nourishing, a Sunday morning congregation which offered some level of personal interaction (led by Francois Heunis), and a Sunday evening celebration which was just that, with the brilliant preaching of Graham Ingram holding it together.)

This model dropped from favour because of fears that the congregations were becoming too autonomous, and because of a fresh sense of being ‘more together than we are apart’ with the impact and influence a single, large congregation could have in a town. Also, in some cases congregations became autonomous churches.

Multiple services
Over the years a number of our churches have held more than one service on a Sunday. For some, especially those that were historically Baptist, this functioned as a morning and evening service which were different in content. However, there have also been numerous examples of churches doing two services at which the preaching was the same, and generally this has been due to limitations of venue size.

For example, when I took on the lead role at New Community Church we moved to a morning and evening service with the same sermon at each because we were doing a building project which meant we had to use part of our meeting space for storage. This was a period when the church saw its only really significant growth in the whole 13 years I was there. At the time I put this down to my dynamic new leadership of the team, but in retrospect I think it was simply that the axiom, “when you give people more options more people opt” proved true.

However, there have been those who have more intentionally gone for a multi-service model in response to, and in order to sustain, growth. For example, Steve Tibbert at King’s Church, Catford.

Going Multi

Going multi is the new buzz in church life. Inspired by the likes of John Piper and Mark Driscoll, many eldership teams are considering the possibility of having more than one meeting or meeting in more than one location. A quick survey suggests that something like twenty-five percent of Newfrontiers UK churches are already doing multi in some form; the vast majority of which are multi-meeting. However, as yet there seems to have been little theological reflection upon this, or consideration of some potential pragmatic pitfalls. Is multi a biblically justifiable model of church life? What are some of the dangers as well as opportunities of this approach? My plan here is to spend a few posts exploring these things.

For the purposes of this post I will use the term multi to refer to both multiple services and multiple venues; the context should make it clear to which I am referring. Please note though, that although going multi-site seems the big step, I consider going multi-service to be the Rubicon – once this is crossed, going multi-site is just a step or two further along the way.

However, a key area is the line at which further Rubicon’s are crossed! The decision to go to more than one meeting is a substantial one, but I would argue that doing multi in extreme form (E.g., calling a ‘campus’ in another nation part of one ‘church’) is a step too far. Exactly where the lines should be drawn between these two points is moot, but would seem to be predicated on the point at which relationships cease to be meaningful.

In terms of resources, the most widely quoted text promoting multi-site is The Multi-Site Church Revolution, by Bird, Ligon & Surratt. While stimulating, this could hardly be described as theological in tone. The most helpful critique I have seen is the 9Marks ejournal on the subject. Some of the articles in this are favourable towards multi, but the general tone is negative. In large part this reflects the Baptist polity of the authors.


A quick sketch of the situation in Newfrontiers

Before getting into the meat of the matter it may be helpful to consider our experience of multi in Newfrontiers – the church context with which I am most familiar. While it may seem that this is a very new phenomenon, there is actually quite a history among us of having more than one meeting. Over the years, a number of Newfrontiers churches have experimented with having more than one Sunday service. In the next post I will re-cap some of these experiments.