Study The Mission - Scan The Methods
Sometime around the second or third week of the Covid-19 lockdown in the UK, I started to put my finger on something going on in me. There was an underlying sadness, and while grief seemed like an inappropriate word to use given the level of suffering so many were experiencing, that’s how it felt.
Working hard as part of the team at my own church through that time, and watching many friends reimagine the form of almost everything they did through not being able to meet together in person, it became clearer what was going on.
I’m a good student. More than doing pretty well at school and three stints in formal education since then, I’m always keen to learn, with a couple of books always on the go and a devices full of podcasts. Having been passionate about Jesus and the church for decades, and working in and around it for the last few years, a high proportion of that learning has been in that area.
As I watched the church be taken apart and put back together again, it felt as though what I’d devoted myself to learning about for so long was crumbling away like a sandcastle at the advancing tide.
So much of the church systems, structures, patterns that I’d read about were now gone. Looking round the world and continuing to reflect as lockdown continued here, it became clear that they were unlikely to return in their previous form, if at all, even after coronavirus is completely behind us. I was a student of something that no longer existed. While, of course, there’s value in studying history, as a practitioner needing to act in the present and be ready for the future (planting a church myself before long), that didn’t abate my grief.
I realised that I had been a student of the current church methods, theories, patterns (which are morphing if not passing on) more than I had been a student of the church’s original blueprint, DNA, unalterable essence (which will outlast and work themselves out through any circumstance). For that, I needed to repent — for being distracted by the temporal at the expense of the eternal; the seasonal at the expense of that which outlasts.
Through the days and weeks that followed, I was able to do that, and God graciously corrected me. Thinking through the current ways of working has value, and I want to do things excellently for Him (read about the ornate beauty of the tabernacle in Exodus 25-31 if you think doing things well doesn’t matter), but it needs to be in balance.
Study the mission - scan the methods.
Be a student of the original design, immerse yourself in it, think it through in every possible dimension.
From that foundation, scan the current methods being used to put that on display in various contexts.
And from there, courageously go about the work of creativity, changing the style as needed and sometimes circumstances dictate, while keeping the substance intact.
All to ensure that what’s being built is that which will not crumble as times change, and will not be prevailed against into eternity.