Total Church

One of my responsibilities at church is to lead a quarterly reading group.  It's a bit self-indulgent, I'm afraid.  It started late last year when I mentioned to a friend or two the desire to read D. A. Carson's The God Who is There with some other folks.  We ended up formalizing the group, and HTC Readers was born.

Last week we held our second meeting to discuss the book Total Church:  A Radical Reshaping around Gospel and Community by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis.  Chester and Timmis are British pastors at a network of house churches called The Crowded House.

This was my second reading of Total Church.  I had first read it a few summers ago under very different life and church circumstances.  Perhaps those differences account for some mixed feelings about the book.

Let me be clear:  this is a great book and deserves wide reading.  There is much that I find very helpful.  Chester and Timmis contend that the local church should be both gospel-centered and community-centered.

The authors love the gospel, and that's the book's greatest strength.  By gospel-centered they mean both word-centered ("because God rules through his gospel word," p. 24) and mission-centered ("because God extends his rule through his gospel word," p. 28).  Everything the church is involved in--evangelism, social involvement, church planting, missions, discipleship, training, pastoral care, spirituality theology, apologetics, and ministering to children and youth--is in some way or another centered upon the good news of Jesus Christ's perfect obedience, substitutionary death, and resurrection from the dead.

I love how this plays out in specific ways.  For example, Chester and Timmis come down strongly on mercy ministry and prioritizing church planting in poor neighborhoods, but they're not in it simply for community development or meeting people's temporal needs.  No, "The most loving thing we can do for the poor is to proclaim the good news of eternal salvation through Christ.  It is by no means the only loving thing we can do for them, but it is the most loving thing we can do" (p. 78, their emphasis).

Their arguments for the centrality of community are also generally compelling.  My favorite was their view of evangelism.  Evangelism is a community task rather than an individual task.  So it's not just that a Christian is obligated to share the gospel with the person sitting next to him on the airplane.  (Excursus:  Why are so many discussions about evangelism fixated on this single scenario?  Do we have to purchase plane tickets to engage in evangelism?  And can't I just read or take a nap while in flight?  Soapus Boxus Finis).  Rather, believers should work to introduce their unbelieving friends and neighbors into the church community.  This exposes them to natural "Jesus talk" and also allows the different members of the community to exercise their different gifts.  Some might be good at bringing people into the community, others might be good at explaining the gospel in a conversation, still others might be good at leading someone through a month long evangelistic Bible study.  We're not all gifted at evangelism in the same way; thinking about evangelism in terms of community rather than as lone rangers takes account of these different gifts.

But the second time around I was not as uncritically enthused as after the first reading.  The authors tend to overstate their case at times, at least in my view.  For example, I'm not sure if I can fully endorse comments like these:  "Too much evangelism [apart from introducing people into your community] is an attempt to answer questions people are not asking" (p. 59).  Didn't Paul just go into the synagogues and public squares and start preaching before there was any community?  "It is not enough to build a relationship between one believer and one unbeliever" (p. 61).  Really, no exceptions?

Similarly, the text is interspersed with personal stories of people who are part of The Crowded House.  Sometimes these gave me the impression that unless you have several people who were not members of your own family living in your house on a permanent basis then you really aren't doing community.  I'm all about hospitality, but I still think I can be hospitable and have real community even if my guest room is unoccupied some nights.

These reservations aside, I affirm the general thrust of this book and hope to work to make my own church family gospel-centered and community-centered.