Making the Most of Every (Sunday) Opportunity

In the last blog, I asked you to envision your church. Most of us, I suspect, can easily picture the gathered church as a meeting-room full of people. But how might we visualize the church scattered? Does this picture come close?

Not so fast, some might say. In Jesus’s parable, “seed” means the word of God. You know the story. Wanting a harvest, a farmer goes out to plant. The seed lands on soil of varying quality. When his disciples ask him to explain, Jesus says, “The seed is the word of God.” Definition given. Conversation over . . .

. . . Until We Read On

In Matthew’s gospel, right after explaining this parable, Jesus goes on to tell a second. In this next one, seed means something else. As before, the farmer goes out and scatters seed in his field. But then an enemy of the farmer sneaks in after dark and blankets the same ground with weed seed. Jesus’s disciples ask him to explain. The good seed in this case, he says, “stands for the people of the Kingdom” (Matt. 13:38, NLT).

In this parable, seeds are . . . people. And the people-seeds are all spread out. So maybe seed does give us a good visual of the church scattered.

Jesus told his seed parables to explain the Kingdom. The seed image, then, helps us see God’s strategy for Kingdom fruit. He plants seed—not only word-as-seed but also people-as-seed. So those gathered on a Sunday morning are not simply the people of the church. They are the seed-people of God’s much larger kingdom.

Two quick points about the second parable:

One: Jesus scatters his seed-people. His sowing hand has sent them flying into the field of his world—into homes, into workplaces, and into neighborhoods to take root there. To thrive. To produce Kingdom fruit. And, as one writer has put it, to provide “foretastes” of the fully-revealed Kingdom yet to come. They spend vastly more time out there than cloistered in a church building.

Two: Seed-people face stiff resistance. The enemy, the devil, has broadcast weed-seed-people right in among Jesus’s good-seed-people. Growing and producing fruit for God in the scattered church is no picnic. It’s a constant struggle for root-space, branching-out-space, water, and sunlight. So maybe we need to change slightly our picture of the scattered church:

Preparing Seed-People to Scatter

This revised picture of the scattered church raises a most-important question about how to structure our time together in the gathered church. As we saw in the last blog, a 75-minute church meeting gets less than one percent the 100,080 minutes in a week. A tiny fund of time. How can we best use it to get the scattered seed-people ready for the challenges and opportunities they meet out there?

Or ask the same question in different words: How can time in the gathered church equip, build, and encourage Christians for serving God and others in their weekdays? Three words in that question point us to what we see happening in the New Testament church:

1. Equipping. This is the special task of church leaders (Eph. 4:11, 12). God’s people will spend most of their week in families, neighborhoods, and workplaces. They will be scattered among unbelievers who are walking radically different paths. What truths and tools will the good-seed-people need for serving God and others Monday through Saturday. How will they practice using those tools?

2. Building. The ministry of body-building—strengthening Christ’s body—belongs to all the Christians: “The body builds itself in love as each part does its work” (Eph. 4:16). Serving God and others in the scattered church takes spiritual muscle. God calls each member of Christ’s body to build others and be built up by them (I Thess. 5:11). This can happen only in the gathered church. You and I can’t use our gifts to build each other up while miles apart all week.

3. Encouraging. Encouragement too is the responsibility of all the believers, not just church leaders. Serving God and people in dark and difficult places can wear us down and out. (A Christian I know who leads seminars sometimes gets marked down in evaluations for using the gendered pronouns—he, she, etc..) Our counter strategy? We are to “encourage one another” (Heb. 3:13, 10:25). And again, our way of gathering together needs to make room for this mutual ministry. God’s scattered seed-people need to encourage each other by telling how God is at work out there.

For Example . . .

Let me illustrate. In Every Good Endeavor, Tim Keller relates exactly that kind of God-at-work story experienced by a man and woman in Redeemer Church, NYC. A non-Christian woman was working in Manhattan as a fairly new employee. One day she messed up in a major way. She thought she’d get fired for sure. But, to her sheer amazement, her supervisor took the blame on himself. He was penalized for doing so by losing some of his own standing in the company.

The grateful woman, stunned by his self-sacrifice for her, told him she was used to having other bosses claim the kudos for work she had done. But this was the first time she had ever known a boss to take the hit for her error. She pressed him repeatedly to explain.

So he told her: “I am a Christian. That means among other things that God accepts me because Jesus Christ took the blame for things that I have done wrong. He did that on the cross. That is why I have the desire and sometimes the ability to take the blame for others.”

“She stared at him,” Keller reports. Then she asked, “Where do you go to church?” He told her the name of the church, and she began attending Redeemer.

Making Sunday Space for Preparing Seed-People

Stories like this renew spiritual vitality in people who serve as Kingdom seeds. From each other, they need to hear such reports in the gathered church. To make this possible, church leaders need to think, pray, and ask hard questions about how best to budget those few gathered-church minutes.

• How can we help those in the scattered church to see themselves as the seed of God’s Kingdom?

• What nice but non-essential activity can be cut from our usual Sunday morning agenda?

• What do seed-people need to hear and do on Sundays to prepare them as Kingdom fruit-producers in the scattered church?
  
  

Teaching One Another in Shared Church

Picture the people in your church. Now imagine Paul the apostle telling them they are “competent to instruct one another.” How would you respond to his evaluation? Perhaps you’d say, “Paul, look again! Teaching should come from our pastor, not from one another.”

Yet Paul actually did write those words to the church congregations in Rome: ““I myself am convinced, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness, complete in knowledge and competent to instruct one another” (Rom. 15:14). So far as we know, the church in Rome was launched not by apostles but by Jews who had become Christ-followers. Were the church-planters the Rome residents who made up part of the crowd at Pentecost (see Acts 2:10)?

When he wrote to the Christians in Rome, Paul had never visited that city. His letter to them did include powerful teaching. But apparently those regular church folks—even before receiving his letter—were already qualified to engage in teaching each other.

Panel of New Testament Authors

Who should do the teaching in churches? By means of paraphrase, let’s follow an imaginary panel discussion among several of those who wrote the New Testament:

• James: Only a few should become teachers. (Jas. 3:1)
• Paul: True, but elders should be able to teach. (I Tim. 3:2; Tit. 1:9)
• John: I agree. But the anointing of God’s Spirit equips all believers to receive teaching directly from him. Jesus himself said so. (Jn. 14:26; I Jn. 2:27).
• Paul: Yet God has appointed gifted teachers in and for the church. (Rom. 12:7; I Cor. 12:28; Eph. 4:11)
• Author of Hebrews: Think of it this way: infant-stage believers need someone to teach them, but maturity should bring an ability to teach. (Heb. 5;12)
• Paul: Yes, the goal is that all believers should be able to teach and instruct each other. (Rom. 15:14; I Cor. 14:26; Col. 3:16).

Each panelist is voicing a piece of the truth. What should we conclude after listening to all four? Might we summarize by saying that some Christians have the gift of teaching, but all should be able to participate in the teaching—with the Holy Spirit playing the key role in both groups?

In a similar way, some of us have the gift of giving, but all of us are to give. Some have the gift of mercy, but God calls all of us to show mercy. Think of the havoc it would play if only those with the gift of giving were allowed to give. Or if none but those with the gift of mercy practiced compassion.

Is Participatory Teaching Still Possible?

Was the balance between teaching by those with the gift and teaching by others possible only in New Testament-era churches? Must teaching today be either/or? Experience in contemporary churches leaves no doubt it can be both/and. In Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, my interviews with pastors and church leaders reveal how much the church can miss if “non-teachers” have no opportunity to teach. Four examples:

Mark Brouwer, Jacob’s Well Church, Chicago, IL: “All in all, participatory church meetings have made it clear that there is a lot of wisdom in this church—far more than just what I am able to bring.”

Bob Hyatt, The Evergreen Community, Portland, OR: “I came to realize that, although I am the recognized preacher, I might not have the most important thing to say on a given Sunday morning. I’ve noticed that when someone other than the preacher begins to speak in a congregational gathering, people sit up and lean forward.”

Lowell Bakke, had served as pastor, Bethany Baptist Church, Puyallup, WA: “I presented a short teaching commentary on the text then asked those present to interact. . . .Roving microphones made it possible for everyone to hear clearly. I was amazed at some of the insights. It made me realize that even with the aid of the Holy Spirit, my mind as a pastor is so finite that I don’t understand many things about the Bible that the congregation was able to bring to the table each Sunday.”

Dan White, Axiom Church, Syracuse, NY: White has developed and fine-tuned a method of teaching with dialogue. A woman in the congregation told him, “In my previous church experience, I never felt I could offer any insights to the family of God—I was just consuming. Now I’m able to contribute.”

Practical Suggestions

Few Christians—even those with long histories in churches—have experienced the one-anothering kind of teaching during a church gathering. Few pastors have had any training in how to format a church meeting to make such teaching possible. Participatory teaching can take place in any number of ways. In his article, “Interactive Preaching,” Stuart Murray Williams suggests several options:  

“[Interactive preaching] might mean drawing the congregation into sermons by asking questions, inviting responses, welcoming insights. It might mean discussion groups during or after sermons. It might mean changing the way the chairs are arranged to make dialogue and discussion possible. It might mean having two speakers debating an issue together, with congregational participation. It might mean asking several people to reflect on a passage for a week and then construct a sermon together. It might mean inviting a congregation to do some preparatory reading during the week so that they can contribute thoughtfully to a teaching period. It might mean developing a culture where people know they are free to interrupt and interject comments.”

Paul is clear that the body of Christ “grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work” (Eph. 4:16). How much fullness would your church gain if all who have Spirit-given insights were given opportunity to do their work by sharing them?