We had a great week in Scotland, and I’ve come back much refreshed. The image is the view a few miles from where we were staying. We saw wild dolphins and seals and eagles. We found empty white sandy beaches, went up mountains and escaped being eaten by midges!
Back in Oxford, I thought Sunday morning was one of our best meetings for a while. The band from Southampton were great (although I must confess to being a bit nervous when they first started singing a Madonna song)! D****, who was visiting us from a closed country in Asia, was inspirational, even without mentioning that he has overseen the planting of dozens of house churches – or that he speaks 10 languages, of which English is his worst.
And I know that many people were helped by Richard Taylor’s message from 1 Samuel 24 about David’s response to being stuck in a dingy cave.
During the meeting, I also shared a forthright exhortation. I don’t do this often, because I know that encouragement is usually more effective in leading the church, but I felt an exhortation was in order, for once. Here is the gist of what I said:
I believe OCC is a good church, but not yet a great church. To be a great church, we would need to be seeing people born again on a regular basis, and we do not. Other churches do! The church that we planted on Blackbird Leys in 2002 saw 23 people saved in March alone. We could see the same.
Some people are making an effort to lead us into effective mission. There are people starting kids clubs, Alpha courses and a café church. Please, let’s get behind them! Let’s get involved! It would be awful if people taking the lead in these faith ventures were to find that no one was willing to join them, and for them to be left alone at the coal-face. This is a key moment in our church’s history, and how we respond to their vision and leadership right now really does matter.
I know that a lot of people want to have an impact in the place where they spend most of their week – their workplace, school or college. And yet, only a handful of church members have seen any of their colleagues turn to Jesus.
Years ago, when someone went to a mission agency and asked to be sent as a missionary to another country, they would be asked, ‘How many people have you led to the Lord in the UK?’ If they admitted that they had not, they would be sent away and invited to apply again once they had acquired that skill. I think there is a lot of sense in that! If you are not impacting people in the place where it is easiest to do so, there is little prospect of doing so in a much harder place.
I believe that many Christians hope to impact people in their workplace, but lack experience of sharing the gospel or praying with unbelievers even in the context of church activities, where it is so much easier to do so. I believe that involvement in a kids club or café church trains Christians very practically in how to offer people an encounter with God. These activities can be like the nursery slopes on which you learn to ski before launching yourself down more challenging slopes, or even off-piste. They provide an important stepping stone towards the everyday, individual impact that we desire to have, but which so often seems beyond us.
Some people might be wondering how these new missional ventures fit with our vision for clusters. My honest answer is that I don’t know. I believe that God has guided us to develop clusters that are really community and really missional. All of the new missional ventures relate somehow to our clusters, but not yet very tidily. I think that’s OK. Let’s let the new wine flow freely, and worry later about quite how it fits into the new wineskins.
Please, get behind those who are leading us in mission to the city. Please, get involved!