Neil Hudson on How We Get from Sunday Disciples to Whole-Life Disciples

There’s a great interview here with my friend and LICC colleague, Neil Hudson, around the theme of his recently-published book, Scattered and Gathered: Equipping Disciples for the Frontline (London: IVP, 2019). I admit I’m biased, but if I had to sell my shirt to get a copy, I would.

CHRISM

CHRISM stands for CHRistians In Secular Ministry.

According to the website:

‘CHRISM is an association for all Christians who see their secular employment as a primary field of Christian ministry and for those who would support and encourage that vision. Most of us during our major active years spend the bulk of our time, talents and energy in secular occupations of some sort, some paid, some unpaid. All of us have responsibilities and some degree of power in those roles, some are even in positions where the decisions we make can affect the lives and well-being of thousands of our fellow men and women. For those who are also Christian ministers it is vital to see how the great Christian truths are fully consistent with our working experience and with contemporary scientific and social understanding, for an essential part of our ministry must be to support and nurture those around us who also recognise and apply these truths in their working lives or are seeking to do so.

The fundamental aims of CHRISM are:

To help ourselves and others to celebrate the presence of God and the holiness of life in our work, and to see and tell the Christian story there.’

The website links to several helpful resources, including occasional papers and a journal, Ministers-at-Work.

L. Gregory Jones on Asking More of Laypeople

L. Gregory Jones has a short article here, looking at how Christian leaders can nurture relationships with laypeople ‘by entering the worlds where laypeople live, think and work – not seeing them primarily as church volunteers and funders’.

Taking a Christian businessman as an example, Jones says:

‘The businessman wanted church leaders to make a claim on him to help him live more faithfully as a disciple of Jesus Christ in his daily life. Church leaders could be more thoughtful in seeing laypeople as disciples who yearn to connect more explicitly their faith with the ideas, insights and imagination they have developed in their vocations.’

He notes that while Christian leaders often empathise when laypeople come to them for spiritual direction or in a pastoral crisis, ‘we often forget the importance of inquiry in our day-to-day leadership of Christian institutions’.

In part, he suggests, leaders forget to ‘practice inquiry’ out of insecurity or defensiveness, or because they ‘believe and act, unwittingly and sometimes wittingly, as though the church and its institutions were the only arenas in which Christian discipleship can be faithfully lived’.

‘Rather than recognizing, rightly, that the church and its institutions are central contexts for worship and the formation of Christian identity, we turn them into idols where they are our exclusive focus.’

This leads to a situation where the border crossing goes only one way, which ‘can alienate the laypeople the church needs to bear faithful witness to God’s kingdom’.

He recommends careful and patient listening to the perspectives of others, and to develop and deepen two-way border-crossing.

Paul Beasley-Murray on Salty Christians

Paul Beasley-Murray, ‘Salty Christians’, Ministry Today 3 (1995).

Okay, I think the title might make a bit too much of the reference in Matthew 5:13, but this is a terrific article (from a paper first presented to a Baptist Assembly Seminar at Bridlington, on 27 April 1994) which resonates with many of our concerns at the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity.

Beasley-Murray lists some of the ways we keep the salt in the salt cellar, essentially keeping people in the religious ghetto of the church – by our preaching, our teaching on stewarship, the activities we lay on and expect people to attend, our concept of mission, and because the ‘close identification of many a ministerial ego with many a church has created a psychological need to emphasise the church over the kingdom’.

Then, more positively, he writes about ‘mobilising salty Christians’ – through preaching and teaching, in the leading of public worship, in decision-making meetings, in Bible studies, in support groups for particular occupational groups, in running a stewardship campaign with a difference, in running church membership classes differently, and in giving people time to live in the real world.

Lots and lots of practical wisdom, much of which still bears repeating.

Redeemer Report (January 2011)

In January 2011’s Redeemer Report, Tim Keller reflects on the significance of lay ministry by taking his cue from Jeremiah 26, and the intervention of the ‘elders of the land’ (26:17) when Jeremiah is threatened with death. As Keller points out, they argue the case from the prophet Micah, demonstrating ‘the importance of having respected laymen who had made their own study of the Scriptures’. Keller goes on to write about the necessity for churches to produce not mere converts but disciples of Christ.

On a related note, the same issue refers to a forthcoming series of ‘gospel and culture lectures’, focusing especially on work, expressing the hope that ‘the church will be awakened to the critical role of work in God’s redemptive plan for all of creation and broaden our understanding of the gospel beyond the walls of the church’.

They cite Dorothy Sayers’ words, first written in the mid-1900s:

‘In nothing has the Church so lost her hold on reality as in her failure to understand and respect the secular vocation. She has allowed work and religion to become separate departments, and is astonished to find that, as a result, the secular work of the world is turned to purely selfish and destructive ends, and that the greater part of the world’s intelligent workers have become irreligious, or at least, uninterested in religion.’