church planting — Blog — Shared Church

***--———Vincent van Gogh: Weaver Standing in Front of Loom———--***

“Shared church.” What does it mean? It’s a short handle for one-anothering, as members of Christ’s body use their Spirit-given gifts for the benefit of all. It also refers to the vital give-and-take between the church gathered and the church scattered.

Large blocks of scattered-church hours are spent on work. Some paid, some unpaid. So the gathered church needs to invest plenty of time preparing people to serve Christ in their work arenas. A while ago, someone asked me, “If you could plant it from scratch, what would a church look like that fully embodied a biblical theology of work and really empowered its members to be ministers in the workplace? What would it do?”

That question sent me searching. I’ve found several ways a “church-from-scratch” might incorporate what God has revealed about work into the agenda of its regular gatherings. Using these practices in a church with years or decades of history would be more difficult—though not impossible. I hope to unroll these ideas in future blogs. In this blog, I’ll try to set the stage for those that follow.

Daily Work Deserves Major Church Attention

Life as a Christ-follower includes more than work. So the focus on our daily labor should not suck all the air out of a church agenda. In Eph. 4:11-12, Paul directs church leaders to prepare God’s people for the work of serving. Believers do such serving in their marriages, in their parenting, in their neighborhoods, in their relationships with believers and unbelievers, in their use of money, and so on. Over the years, many churches have offered training in most of these areas.

But even though Christians spend so much of their serving time working, equipping them to do their daily work as a faith-worship offering has been missing from most fellowships. The multiple strands in the pattern for Kingdom-of-God living need to be woven firmly into the fabric of each congregation. Yet in most churches, the threads of work-truth are not in the “loom.” This void has created the need to focus extra attention on how to incorporate the theology of work into the very life of the gathered church.

What Is the “Theology of Work”?

The theology of work is the study of what God says about work. In Scripture, God has given us answers to important questions: How did work originate? Why does God want us to work? What about work and money? What guards us from overworking? Does our work accomplish anything of spiritual value? In Every Good Endeavor, Tim Keller and Kathryn Leary Alsdorf open Chapter One this way: “The Bible begins talking about work as soon as it begins talking about anything—that is how important and basic it is.”

The theology of work cannot replace the gospel. But the gospel must transform every square inch of our scattered-church lives. So right instruction on what Scripture reveals about work should take its proportional place in the menu of teaching about what Christians are to believe and to do. For most believers, paid or unpaid work claims a thick slice of life’s pie-chart. “Proportional,” then, should translate into a significant amount of teaching on work in a given year.

Truth or Tradition?

You’ve probably heard the saying, "The trouble with people is not that they don’t know but that they know so much that ain’t so." Along the way, church people absorb many ideas about work that just “ain’t so.” This means that much of the teaching on work will involve unlearning—clearing away debris deposited by many religious traditions.

One of those time-worn but unbiblical notions splits work into two tiers. There’s the upper level. So-called “spiritual work” is seen to be the kind God really cares about—working on a church staff, crossing a cultural boundary or an ocean to do work overseen by a mission board. Work of that sort. Then there’s the lower tier—so-called “secular” work, which includes pretty much everything else. Programming computers. Keeping books for a corporation. Flying commercial jetliners. Managing a household. God, according to this way of thinking, doesn’t value lower-tier labor nearly as much as he does the higher “spiritual work.”

Split-Level Living

Two-tiered thinking has consequences. Labeling some work as “spiritual” and other work as “secular” leads to split-level living. As a result, Christians must cope with a divided mindset, a double-mindedness. This produces what might be called the “present-body-absent-heart” syndrome. Yes, people show up for work, but their hearts are somewhere else. They wish for evenings or weekends, when they can engage in church activities that “really matter to God.” Or they bide their time until retirement sets them free to do something they see as spiritually significant.

Gallup polls reveal that only one-third of American workers are “engaged” with their work. This leaves the other two-thirds as either “not engaged” or “actively disengaged.” This present-body-absent-heart condition involves great loss not only for working Christians but for their employers as well.

Pint-Sized Vision

This sacred-secular work divide also produces small-scale thinking about why to get out of bed to go to work. Many Christians have been conditioned to believe “secular” work has only two values. One, it puts believers into contact with unbelievers, thus providing opportunities for sharing the good news about Jesus. And two, it provides money to pay the bills and to support “spiritual” causes—the church and overseas missions.

But—on any given day—seeing only these two values for “secular” work offers very little incentive. First, because the boss is paying for hours on the job, appropriate opportunities to explain the gospel to coworkers come only rarely. And second, paychecks don’t arrive every day. So most workdays can drag on with seemingly no eternal value. Actually, though, God has not just these two but many more reasons for sending so many Christ-followers into the work world.

Where can the misleading—and hurtful—ideas about work be replaced with biblical and true ones? The best place, I believe, is the gathered church. Earnings from the workplace, from the scattered church, support the gathered church. In shared church, the gathered part reciprocates with teaching and encouragement.

So in this upcoming series of blogs, I hope to describe a variety of ways in which a biblical theology of work can be woven into the life of your church. Ways in which your church, on Sundays, can equip God’s people for their workdays.

Suppose someone were to develop new software called “Question Detector.” If you were to use it before, during, and after the sermon on a given Sunday in your congregation, how many questions would the program uncover in the pews or chairs? More importantly, how many of those questions would remain unasked and unaddressed as the meeting ended?

In his blog, Dave Simpson, a pastor in Maryland, asked: “Where did we ever get the idea that Christians shouldn’t ask questions about their faith? . . . We may not be putting inquirers on the rack . . . anymore, but our spoken and unspoken attitudes toward questions are driving people away.”

Church Discussions in Sao Paulo

In doing the research for my book, Curing Sunday Spectatoritis, I interviewed Jane Hawkins. She and her husband, Pete, had planted the Sampa Community Church in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The main teaching for the congregation came by means of DVDs (with subtitles for Portuguese speakers) from Andy Stanley, pastor of the Northpoint Community Church in Atlanta, GA. After the 35-40-minute message, the congregation divided into small groups to discuss what they had heard. In time, the Sampa Church hired a teaching pastor. But the people insisted on keeping the after-sermon discussion period.

The Hawkins have planted 2 other churches using the same approach—messages by Stanley followed by the conversational interaction time immediately afterward. To prompt discussion, the Hawkins use modified questions supplied by Northpoint Ministries. To prevent the risk of any arguments over theology or having to publicly correct someone, they make certain the questions are experiential. As each meeting ends, Pete wraps up the discussion, repeats worthwhile comments, ties everything back to the message, and closes in prayer.

Questions for God

The other day, in response to my blog on the importance of questions, Jane wrote with news from their most recently planted church in Sao Jose dos Campos. At a church gathering earlier that week, she had invited the people to write out their responses to this question: “If you could ask God a question, what would it be?” The results surprised her. “These were mostly Christians,” she wrote, “and yet, look at the questions we got.”

Why do people feel so lonely that they have to believe in God? Does God really exist?
If a person doesn’t have faith or believe, will God forgive them at the end? I mean… will he show them the truth and give them a chance to save themselves?
What’s the difference between God’s permission and God’s plan?
Why did God change people’s languages at Babel?
Does God really love everyone independent of their religion or belief?
Why does God stay silent when you are living a difficult moment? You pray, pray, and nothing happens. Why? Tell me!
How was God created?
Is God one person or three? Why do Christians believe that Jesus is also God? What about the Holy Spirit?
If the Bible was written by humans, how can I believe it is inspired by God?
If there are so many religions, why do you preach that Christianity is the right one?

Jane said: “I knew during the church discussion no one would call out their question for God. So at the end of the 15-minute discussion period, I read out that list. The room went quiet, because they were questions so many of us could relate to, and they were so honest.” Pete and Jane decided to focus in on the first question and open the meeting up to discuss it. They deliberately chose NOT to have a pastor give the "right" answer, but to let the "ordinary" people themselves make comments.

“Revolutionary. Community-Building”

“Wow,” wrote Jane, “it was powerful. A girl from Estonia talked about life under the Soviet Union where they were taught there is no God, then they became independent and missionaries of all kinds came, and 'Now, I am still trying to figure it out.' Two guys quoted from apologist William Lane Craig. One person talked about the wonders of creation that testify to a Creator. She said this planet, space, and the animal kingdom all testify that they were designed. One person said he had had a prayer answered that week.”

Jane concluded: “All that to say—doing this sort of discussion after the message is revolutionary and community-building. It engages everyone.” Well, almost everyone. One Christian left the fellowship because the whole-church discussion time made him uncomfortable. Jane believes he was more at ease in the traditional church of his childhood. “He is shy,” she said, “and doesn’t mix with people—not visitors, not lost people, not even other Brazilian Christians.”

In his book, Partners in Preaching, Reuel L. Howe, describes the interplay between questions and responses: “Dialogical preaching . . . is a two-way give-and-take; it is a partnership. In dialogical preaching we need the question and the answer. The question awaits the answer, and the answer needs the guidance of the question. The preacher is, so to speak, master-of-ceremonies in the dialogue between question and answer.”

I doubt that question-detecting software will be available anytime soon. No matter. We don’t need it. By simply adopting a shared-church format, leaders will find that church people are eager to ask their pressing questions. The askings will come in all sizes, shapes, and colors. As Jane Hawkins found, many will come as surprises. Some will require I-don’t-know-but-will get-back-to-you responses. But the payoff will come in the form of increased relevance, as the timeless truths of the Gospel sync with the real-life concerns of contemporary Christians.

Weaving Work-Truth into Church Life (Part One)