Missional Church and Messy Discipleship: A Case Study
The missional conversation in Europe is slowly gathering pace. Over New Year, I attended the Mission-Net congress in Offenberg, Germany. More than 2800 young people from many countries across Europe, including Belarus, Estonia, Albania and Turkey were encouraged to ‘transform their world’ in many creative ways.
For Christians who want to adopt a missional mindset, Frost (2011, p28) poses the following important question: what does the reign of God through Christ look like in my neighbourhood? If the kingdom of God has come and is overlapping with the broken world in which I live, how can I alert people to it? … this is a far more legitimate and creative question to ask than the usual questions about how we can attract people to our church programs.
But changing church culture from ‘maintenance’ to ‘missional’ comes with a health warning! As has been highlighted before in Vista (for example Missional in Berlin, Jan 2013), missional church aims to truly reach those outside of the church, rather than solely serve the needs of those who already attend. The practices may look very different from what we expect from Sunday services (and may not even be on a Sunday!). Discipleship becomes messy, because church is often centred around community and belonging, before people are expected to believe or behave.
“what does the reign of God through Christ look like in my neighbourhood? If the kingdom of God has come and is overlapping with the broken world in which I live, how can I alert people to it? ”
The following case study highlights some of these issues. It features the Gospel Fellowship, a church birthed within Copenhagen’s Gospel singing community, and is based on interviews conducted in 2010 and 2013 with Peter Dhyr, pastor of the Gospel Fellowship. While many churches in Denmark, and indeed Scandinavia and beyond, have a Gospel choir, often the strategy has been to start a Gospel choir in order to get the people into church and convert them so they become part of the church. The Gospel Fellowship has a different vision. While initially it was the umbrella of a local Lutheran Church, Kobenhavns Frimenighed, it began not as church having gospel choir but rather as gospel choirs becoming church in their own right.
Peter and the choir leaders Hans Christian Jochimsen and Claes Wegener, sensed that God was already at work in the Gospel Choir community. People were being touched by the Holy Spirit through the power of the music and words, but they would not then automatically go to ‘church’ because they viewed it negatively as an institution.
‘There isn’t that much residual memory of faith in Danish culture,’ says Peter. ‘Not many of the people who attend the Gospel choir were confirmed or baptised. If they went through confirmation, they hated it. Maybe they have come to a Sunday service and found it boring and didn’t connect with it – but this is where the Gospel music is so powerful – it is not charismatic, but it is highly inspirational and connects highly with their feelings’.
‘In these choirs people are coming to faith without knowing it, who can’t go anywhere with their faith because there hasn’t been any system of discipleship or a path where people can walk to develop their faith. So we decided we would love to do a church that somehow could take these people to the place where they want to go.’
Over the last four years, the team have developed a structure of big celebrations, mid-size clusters and now small groups within the Gospel Fellowship, in order to create this ‘path’. They have two Sunday services each month – one is a ‘big choir’ celebration and the other is a billed as a ‘meditation’. They have Gospel music as their worship style with everyone taking part, and the liturgy is adapted to suit the target audience. On another Sunday the smaller cluster meets, with a brunch, singing and group discussion. Newcomers are invited to hear more about the church: ‘They have to be part of the fellowship to see what it is. They will have been to a celebration and experienced a cluster, then we will tell them what it means.’
The Fellowship also organises four practical courses for people who want to be more intentional about their faith: subjects include leading yourself, growing in spirituality, discovering your spiritual gifts and a second level of leadership training.
Small groups are just beginning. ‘Some people will have already experienced a Church small group already, but it may have been a negative experience for them,’ explains Peter. ‘Ours will be about teaching discipleship and values. Discipleship happens through conversation and experience. We need to be living examples that people copy and try to do themselves.’
The path of discipleship displayed in the Gospel Fellowship is very much ‘belong, believe, behave’ rather than the process of believe, behave, belong that is expected by some churches. Belonging takes place as people feel they belong to the choir. As they attend, they are touched by the Holy Spirit, but are also given a language to explain what is happening: ‘it is not just ‘healing and good thoughts but we need to say ‘this is the Holy Spirit you are experiencing – this is the love of God’, says Peter. They start to open their hearts and become believers – like the atheist who is now saying ‘I am an atheist, but I am starting to believe in God. I can see there is something going on in me, even though I don’t think God exists.’
“I am an atheist, but I am starting to believe in God. I can see there is something going on in me, even though I don’t think God exists.”
This is where it gets messy. Because people already have a strong sense of belonging, and are on a journey to belief, many people who are part of the church who do not yet ‘behave’. ‘We want them to behave not because of rules but because their hearts have been transformed by God,’ says Peter. ‘But negatively, we could be too accepting. It could be we have no ambition for people to be transformed.’
‘How much noise can we live with and how much do we expect people to have the same values?’ Do we accept the mess and try to play the right melody and hope that people pick up the tune as we go along?’
As we wrestle with these issues, we turn to the example of Jesus. The story of the woman caught in adultery gives a biblical example of how he dealt with this tension. If he did not condemn, then we certainly cannot, as we recognise we are all on the same journey of receiving forgiveness. But just as Christ always called those he encountered to a different way, a higher ideal and a new kind of living, so we too need to balance love, acceptance and non-condemnation with the call to ‘go now and leave your life of sin’ (John 8:11).
Joanne Appleton
Reference
Frost, M. (2011) The Road to Missional: Journey to the Center of the Church, Grand Rapids: Baker Books.