Stephen Cottrell’s vision of an evangelising church embraces Christians of every tradition, and explores practical ways of developing structures and ministries that will establish a culture of evangelism in local churches.
140 pp. Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd. To purchase this book online, go to www.darton-longman-todd.co.uk
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Defining terms
PART ONE: GOD’S VISION FOR AN EVANGELISING CHURCH
1. Prayer – the way we access and are renewed by God’s vision
2. A theological vision: the faith that changes our life and the
gospel we share
3. What kind of church does God want us to be?
A sermon: Getting evangelism onto the agenda
A conversation in the pub after the service
Intermission: The culture in which we evangelise and the ways we respond
PART TWO: THE MINISTRY OF EVANGELISM
4. A model for evangelism
5. Building a place of nurture
6. Getting started/Developing contact
7. Conversion
8. Helping people grow in their faith/Building community
9. Evangelising worship
A closing meditation: Mary the Evangelist
A prayer inviting God to use us in the ministry of evangelism
Resources
Notes
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Review |
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PART ONE: GOD’S VISION FOR AN EVANGELISING CHURCH
Chapter One: Prayer – the way we access and are renewed by God’s vision
For nearly ten years much of my ministry was involved in helping churches engage with the ministry of evangelism. On many occasions I would go to a church to talk about evangelism and sit down with their PCC or another group within the parish, and after about ten minutes I would shut up about evangelism and start talking about prayer instead.
To put it bluntly: you can’t give what you haven’t got. How stupid of us to think that we could ever be effective in evangelism unless it arose from an authentic and lived spirituality.
The most basic meaning of the word ‘evangelism’ is the sharing of good news. Although many people in the church today are still suspicious about evangelism, the sharing of good news is something we do all the time. If we have experienced something as good and joyful, there is nothing more natural than to share it with others. So, if we go to a good film, read a good book, if our football team wins, or if a new child is born into our family, we tell people about it. We don’t feel we are oppressing them in any way by telling them about it. We don’t necessarily expect, and we certainly don’t demand, that they see the film, read the book, support the team or adopt the baby! We are not looking for any reward. We simply share our excitement with them. We have experienced something to be good. We tell people about it. We can do no other.
Therefore, before going any further, any church that wants to develop a ministry of evangelism needs to ask itself: ‘Do we experience the Christian faith and our membership of the church as good news for our own lives? Is it actually shaping and informing our life in such a way that we could ever imagine telling anyone anything about it?’ And if the answer is no – if we actually experience the church as dull, life denying, tired, pointless; if the life we lead on Monday is completely disconnected from the faith we celebrate on Sunday – then it is little wonder that not much evangelism happens. There is no good news to share. Or else the good news is entirely an abstract, second-hand set of propositions about God and the universe. We may believe the Christian faith to be true (though this may also be the problem) but it is not true in any way that is remotely relevant to life.
The thinking about evangelism that shapes this book is that we give from the overflow of what we have received. Therefore a way of moving on from the question ‘Do we experience the Christian faith as good news?’ is ‘Are we in a place of receiving where the goodness of what God reveals to us in Christ can actually start shaping and changing our lives?’ And what would such a place look like? In other words, are we developing in our churches an authentic and lived spirituality that can shape the lives of individuals and communities? Before the church can evangelise the world, the gospel must evangelise the church.
And here we come to the first of many paradoxes that inevitably shape any consideration of Christian faith. It is in giving that we receive. We may not get very far in enabling the gospel to evangelise the church if we do it in a vacuum, locked away inside church buildings and church culture. It might best be done in the community around us. After all, the raison d’être of the church is the needs of the world. With proper humility we need to allow the questions of the world to shape the agenda of the church.
We also need a keen awareness that whenever we dare to speak of God, and whenever we deal with the deepest mysteries of the human response to God, and the issues of life and death that go with it, we are treading on sacred ground. It is not something over which we have authority or control. Aware of our own shortcomings and needs, the best way to proceed is to recognise ourselves as fellow seekers in the way of faith. You can’t accompany anyone from a seated position!
In other words we get on with the ministry of evangelism, but stop doing it in a way that suggests we have all the answers (Jesus is the answer. Now, what was the question?). Too often what passes for evangelism in the church is really just a parading of slogans or, worse, a condemnation of anyone who doesn’t share our world view.
Someone has defined evangelism as one beggar telling another beggar where to get bread. Rather than being paralysed by the recognition that our own lives are only very dimly lit by the gospel, we could use this as a starting point for activities that help us address questions of meaning and faith in a way that will allow us to make common cause with others – as yet outside the Christian community – who are asking similar questions.
We will return to this approach when we consider the actual doing of evangelism later in the book. For the time being it is important to be clear about this most basic realisation: the chief reason that many churches struggle with evangelism – and so much more – is that they are not places of prayer. Addressing this issue must be the first step towards becoming an evangelising, mission-shaped church. This is the way we will grow in our own relationship with God. This is the way we will find a faith to share as well as a natural and unforced way of sharing it. This is the way we will discover God’s vision for God’s church. Joyfully – and with some relief – we embrace the paradox that the best way of helping the church discover an authentic spirituality might also be the best way of evangelising a spiritually starved culture. But this is another subject we will return to.
Learning to pray
Jesus says, ‘give and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back’ (Luke 6:38). This is undoubtedly true for the ministry of evangelism. If anyone says to me they would like to grow in their faith, then my best advice is to suggest they try and give their faith away. It is in facing the issues that are involved in living and sharing the faith that we are most likely to discover what we actually believe and what its relevance is (or isn’t!) for our lives.
We will also learn to pray like never before. We will quickly discover that neither the example of our goodness nor the eloquence of our speech will ever make anyone into a Christian. But we will also discover another important gospel paradox. The humble admission of our failure, and the testimony of the grace and help we have received, will really communicate, and in giving we will have received.
Let us then return to the question of prayer. How shall we define prayer? Well, think of God as the great Lover who longs to communicate his love to his people. The Christian revelation is that God longs to enjoy community with the creation he has made and particularly with humankind. We are the people who are able to respond with the selfsame love from which we were created. Therefore God is constantly coming into our presence to proclaim his love. Supremely God has come to us through Jesus Christ whose own life is a perfect statement of God’s intent. He comes to pledge his troth to us. His life is a demonstration of love. Through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit this same offer of love is made to the world today.
Moreover, we are the Beloved. We are the object of God’s love. We are made in his image and alone in all creation (as far as our present understanding can tell) able to return the love we receive. Because it is love, God can never, and will never, force or coerce us into responding, but he always waits upon us. Through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, when we do make the free response of love (more of this later) we are brought into community with God.
We could therefore define prayer as ‘The Lover coming into the presence of the Beloved and saying “I love you”.’ (1) It describes not just the heart of prayer, but also the heart of faith, since the two must go together. It also begins with God’s initiative: his love for us and our openness to receive that love.
What we call prayer is actually our response to God. In its most raw and basic form, it is the longing of our heart to know God. In response to what we see and experience God doing for us in Christ – the showing forth of love – we splutter in reply, ‘I love you too’.
This resonance in the human heart between the love of God and the response of the human spirit is in fact the highest form of prayer and will be the stuff of eternity. Helping people into this prayer requires that we preach the gospel. We tell people about the love of God in Christ and the affirmation, forgiveness and acceptance that it offers. We tell of our own need of God and of the change and blessing it has brought to our lives. It is not a formula or a technique – though in time formulas and techniques may help us grow in making an ordered response to God, for discipline as well as desire is required in the life of prayer. We gently lead people to a place where they can receive God’s love. This happens in fleeting moments and in ordered occasions – in times of prayer, in fellowship with other people, and in the worship of the church. And we help people make their response, using the forms of the liturgy, or their own words, or the deep and expectant silence of contemplation. People learn to receive, and because what they receive is good and beautiful they can’t help sharing it, they can’t stop it making a difference in their lives.
As we shall see later, this doesn’t mean that we don’t need specific evangelism strategies and programmes. But it does mean that none of them will be any help whatsoever unless we have first become a people of prayer. When the church becomes a house of prayer, says Brother Roger of Taize, people will come running. In my own ministry as a priest I have glimpsed the truth of this astonishing claim.
Chapter Two: . A theological vision: the faith that changes our life and the gospel we share
As we pray, as we experience ourselves to be the Beloved of God, and as we know God to be the world’s great Lover, so our own capacity for love is extended and expanded. We begin to love the world more, we begin to love each other more and we begin to catch hold of God’s vision for God’s church in God’s world. We think less about our own plans and begin to wonder what God’s purposes might be. Catching hold of this vision is what I am calling our participation in the mission of God: placing ourselves in the sending flow of God’s love. It is through a life lived in community with God, a life shaped by intimate prayer and the worship of the church, that this happens. It could hardly be any other, since the Christian revelation of God is of a community of persons, whose pleasant company with each other is an ever-widening circle of love, endlessly creative, self-giving and inclusive. The God who is community wishes to extend the invitation of community to the whole creation and especially to every human person. Thus the proclamation of Christ is the proclamation of a person through whom we have community with God (see Ephesians 2: 17). The Christian faith – or what we should properly call the Christian life – is an invitation to join this community. This is why, from a catholic perspective, the invitation to know Christ is always an invitation to community with God within the household of the church.
This abundant life is revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, but as we will explore in more detail when we discuss how we accompany people on the way to faith, it is best understood as a demonstration of God’s own love, and an invitation to receive it for ourselves. Therefore the work of evangelism is much more than asking people to give intellectual assent to the truths about God – inviting them to believe certain things – it is a call to receive the generosity of God and then to live lives of generosity and hospitality that invite others in.
Although we shall deal with this in detail in the penultimate chapter, developing a generous and hospitable Christian community is in many respects a vital first step to becoming an evangelising church. But as we have already noted, this sort of growth and development is not linear or formulaic. It is not a matter of following certain steps, so much as living out certain attitudes and developing a certain kind of personhood in our relationship with each other and the world.
So we begin with prayer – our own relationship with God – and then we try to see the world and ourselves from God’s perspective, and try to grow a Christian community which reflects these attitudes and values. This will be an authentic Christian community. It will also be an attractive community that people will want to join. However, it is not a matter of waiting to see who comes and then making them welcome. It must involve living out what we believe in a way that raises questions about the whole of life, and encourages others to explore. (l) It must also include ways of helping others to make the journey we are travelling.
Robert Warren has written powerfully about this approach to church life which emphasises health rather than growth. His book Building Missionary Congregations has helped many churches re-think their ministry from the perspective of mission. In turn, the research he did in many growing churches caused him to realise that growth is a natural consequence of health. His latest book, The Healthy Churches’ Handbook, identifies seven marks of a healthy church and also provides a practical guide for giving your own church a health check. The seven marks of a healthy church are:
1. it is energised by faith
2. it has an outward-looking focus
3. it seeks to find out what God wants
4. it faces the cost of change and growth
5. it operates as a community
6. it makes room for all
7. it does a few things and does them welI. (2)
Any church wanting to develop a ministry of evangelism will benefit from seeing how it can be a natural part of what it means to be a healthy church.
The following famous quotation from Lesslie Newbigin makes the same striking point about how we as the church will reveal or obscure the gospel:
How is it possible that the gospel should be credible, that people should come to believe that the power which has the last word in human affairs is represented by a man hanging on a cross? I am suggesting that the only answer, the only hermeneutic of the gospel, is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it. (3)
Purpose
There is an important sense in which the vision of God’s purposes for the world is something given. The Christian faith is a revealed faith. Of course we must interpret what God has given us, and of course we will discover new insights as the Holy Spirit leads us deeper into the truth of this revelation, but the revelation itself, the basic truths that go to make up Christian faith, is not something we decide upon: it is something we have received.
In the Diocese of Oxford, where I now serve, great emphasis is placed on God’s purposes for the world in our Developing Servant Leaders programme. Christian vision is God’s vision for God’s world and therefore ought to be recognisably the same for all Christians in all ages and contexts. (4) In a memorable phrase, Bill Hybels, the leader of the Willow Creek church in Chicago, has said, ‘Vision is the picture of the future that produces passion.’
In trying to develop servant leadership at the heart of the church we identify a pattern of working which we hope will help our churches grow. This pattern is also relevant as we look at developing a ministry of evangelism in the church. There are three concepts:
Vision is something that is given; purpose is something we work out in response to the vision. Vision is like the mountain top to which we are climbing; purpose is the pathway we choose to take (recognising there may be more than one, and making decisions about the way we won’t go just as much as the way we will). Strategy is the short-term plans we make resulting in the action we take: the individual steps that make up the journey.
Another important concept that sits alongside these three concepts is referred to as alignment. Alignment is concerned with bringing into harmony all the various aspects of the organisation (people, structures, finances, decision making – in this case the church) so that the vision, purpose and strategy can be worked through.
In the programme we use the following image to illustrate the whole process: imagine a wall with something that is desired waiting at the top. This is the vision. The ladder that you place against the wall is your purpose: your chosen way of realising the vision. The rungs on the ladder are the individual objectives that are needed in order to ascend the ladder. : The precise order of the rungs also gives these objectives priority. Alignment is needed so that the plans you make ensure that there are people available with the time and ability to climb ladders!
You will find similar ideas (and a seemingly infinite variety of jargon!) in all kinds of books on leadership and management. But this terminology seems to be serving the church well, and fits in with a Christian understanding of leadership. It is about how vision is turned into purposeful action. Most of it is applied common sense. Nevertheless, it is astonishing how often we in the church fail to take a strategic approach.
Where the image breaks down is that it seems to present in a linear form what is in reality a more complex and diffuse process. Nevertheless the basic ideas are extremely helpful and underpin the whole of this book. Part One of the book is about vision: about how we receive vision and how we begin to let it shape our life. Part Two is concerned chiefly with purpose: mapping the choices we need to make about the longer-term development of an evangelising church. But in each chapter there are examples of how these ideas have been worked through in the strategies and plans of individual churches.
So if the heart of the vision that God reveals to us as we live our lives in relationship with him is one of koinonia – community – then what are the purposes of an evangelising church that seeks to live out this vision in such a way that others are included in the community of God? And what kind of church are we called to be?
Resources
This is inevitably a brief and partial selection of what is available. But I have tried to list not only those resources that come from a specifically catholic standpoint, but also those which will resonate with and challenge catholic parishes wanting to engage with evangelism in the way this book encourages.
Evangelism
Abrahams, William, The Logic of Evangelism (Eerdmans, 1996)
Booker, Mike, and Mark Ireland, Evangelism – which way now? An evaluation of Alpha, Emmaus, Cell church and other contemporary strategies for evangelism (Church House Publishing, 2003)
Butler, Angela, Personality and Communicating the Gospel, Grove Evangelism Series 47 (Grove Books, 1999)
Cottrell, Stephen, Sacrament, Wholeness and Evangelism, Grove Evangelism Series 33 (Grove Books, 1996)
Croft, Steven, Yvonne Richmond, and Nick Spencer, Evangelism in a Spiritual Age: communicating faith in a changing culture (Church House Publishing, 2005)
Donovan, Vincent J., Christianity Rediscovered (Orbis, 1993)
Evangelisation in the Modern World (Catholic Truth Society, 1976)
Finney, John, Emerging Evangelism (DLT, 2004)
Fung, Raymond, The Isaiah Vision (CCBI, 1992)
Holmes, John, Vulnerable Evangelism: The Way of Jesus, Grove Evangelism Series 54 (Grove Books, 2001)
John, Jeffrey (ed.), Living Evangelism; Affirming Catholicism and Sharing the Faith (DLT, 1996) Going for Growth: a strategy for incumbents of smaller parishes in the central and catholic traditions (Affirming Catholicism)
Preparing for Mission Weekends, a leaflet to facilitate evangelism in the local church produced jointly by ReSource, the Oxford diocese and The College of Evangelists, available from ReSource. Their website and the Oxford diocesan website also have evangelism resources available at www.oxford.anglican.org or www.resource-arm.net
Tomlin, Graham, The Provocative Church (SPCK, 2004)
Yaconelli, Mark, Contemplative Youth Ministry (SPCK, 2006)
Nurture
Ball, Peter, and Malcolm Grundy, Faith on the Way; A Practical Guide to the Adult
Catechumenate (Continuum, 2000)
Essence; a six-session course for spiritual seekers (Kingsway/CPAS)
John, Jeffrey, This is our Faith (Redemptorist Publications, 1995)
See also pp. 56-8 where the nurture courses Alpha, Emmaus, Faith on the Way and Start! are described.
Apologetics
Harries, Richard, God outside the box: why spiritual people object to Christianity (SPCK, 2002)
Prayer
Burnham, Andrew, Manual and Pocket Manual of Anglo-Catholic Devotion Cottrell, Stephen, Praying through life (Church House Publishing, 2003)
Guiver, George, Everyday God (Triangle, 2002)
Nichols, Aidan, A Spirituality for the Twenty:first Century (Our Sunday Visitor, 2003)
Warner, Martin, The Habit of Holiness (Continuum, 2005)
Church
Jackson, Bob, Hope for the Church: Contemporary Strategies for Growth (Church House Publishing, 2002)
The Road to Growth: Towards a Thriving Church (Church House Publishing, 2005)
Mission-shaped Church: church planting and fresh expressions of church in a changing context, report from a working group of the Church of England’s Mission and Public Affairs Council (Church House Publishing, 2004)
Warren, Robert, The Healthy Churches’ Handbook (Church House Publishing, 2004)
Worship
Conway, Stephen (ed.), Living the Eucharist (DLT, 2001)
Earey, Mark, Liturgical Worship: How it works and why it matters (Church House Publishing, 2002)
Giles, Richard, Re-pitching the Tent: re-ordering the church building for worship and mission in the new millennium (Canterbury Press, 2000)
Creating Uncommon Worship: transforming the liturgy of the Eucharist Canterbury Press, 2004)
Marshall, Michael, Free to Worship: creating transcendent worship today
(Zondervan, 1996)
Perham, Michael, New handbook of Pastoral Liturgy (SPCK, 2000)
Ward, Pete (ed.), Mass Culture: Eucharist and Mission in a Post-Modern World (Bible Reading Fellowship, 1999)
Books to give to new Christians or for those who want to find out more
Cottrell, Stephen, and Steven Croft, Travelling Well: A Companion Guide to the Christian Faith (Church House Publishing, 2000)
Cottrell, Stephen, On this Rock: Bible Foundations for Christian Living (Bible Reading Fellowship, 2003)
Notes
Chapter One:
1. I have written about this in my book I Thirst: The Cross – the Great Triumph of Love (Zondervan, 2003), pp. 131-5.
Chapter 2:
1. Graham Tomlin has written very powerfully about this aspect of evangelism in his book The Provocative Church (SPCK, 2002).
2. Robert Warren, The Healthy Churches’ Handbook (Church House Publishing, 2004), p. vii.
3. Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (SPCK, 1989), p. 227.
4. Here I am following closely the notes from the Developing Servant Leaders’
Handouts written by Keith Lamdin, Director of the Oxford Diocesan Board of Stewardship, Training, Evangelism and Ministry, DSL Handout Folder, 2004.
