The sixth in the series by Paul Wallis, Chaplain General of Jesus Generation, and lecturer in Church History and Hermeneutics at Unity College, A.C.T.
Some years ago I was offered a very nice job. It hasn’t happened to me often so I remember it quite distinctly. There were particular elements of the job package that made it a very attractive offer: the salary, the location, a national position in the denomination, and an office in their plush denominational headquarters. It was also a denomination for which I had a lot of respect and affection.
“We would like you to plant a church for us in York,” the big chief told me. “Now there is a strategy that we would like you to follow in planting the church. You follow it and we finance it. It’s not the only way to plant a church, but we’ve been using it for many years now and we like it,” he continued.
“We will raise a substantial budget which will pay for a prestige venue over a period of a week to ten days. We bring in a stage set, musicians, some big name speakers and provide a quality, excellence-driven ministry which we will promote to pull in a big crowd.
What the crowd sees for those ten days gives them a taste of what kind of a church you’re planting. Out of what you have left of that budget - plus anything you’ve raised in the meetings during those ten days - you hire a venue, using the branding and images you’ve used during the campaign, and you see how many of that crowd you can keep. After a few months your numbers will drop down to basically those who are going to be your core. After that, you make it work.”
As I listened I could see how my own development in local ministry had prepared me for just such a venture. The way our pattern of ministry had been evolving there meant that I was now very familiar with this attractional approach. This was because each successive year our town received a fresh swathe of new students from all around the country and all around the world. Wanting to attract as many of the Christians within that group as possible, we matched that major influx of young people with heavily promoted attractional services. In these meetings we worked hard to see that the music was well executed, the platform ministry energetic, and the preaching entertaining and intense. Naturally we learned that we couldn’t confine that approach to once a year – because there’s a little law that says: “What you attract with, you keep with.” In other words, if people come in January for great music, amazing lighting and free food, better make sure you have great music, amazing lighting and free food in December. Without really thinking too much about it we had progressively raised the “quality” of our “Sunday product” over the previous few years.
So I was familiar with the model of attracting people with something excellent and exciting, and had been working on my “platform ministry” accordingly over the previous years. I was at home with the approach to planting which began by giving people the freedom to begin with no expectations and no commitment, leaving them free to come and go. Obviously the hope was that a core of more committed people would condense in the course of time. So the job I was now being offered was a natural next step in my journey of learning to church-plant. Indeed I would have snapped that job up without a second thought, if it hadn’t been for a chance encounter a few months before.
Preparing a teaching series on the Holy Spirit and searching my bookshelves in search of fresh inspiration, I stumbled across a battered old hardback entitled “Is the Spirit of the Lord straitened?” It had sat on my shelves for some years, patiently waiting to be read, but once I opened it I quickly realised its urgent relevance to me. This is what I read:
“I have long had the impression that the great [lack among] the churches – all the Churches – is more of the life of God. Much attention is given to the elaboration and perfecting of ecclesiastical machinery, to…church architecture…aesthetic ritual…the raising of money…to…externals. But the remedy does not lie in these directions; it lies in the direction of a new baptism of the Holy Ghost…deeper, fuller draughts of the water of life…”
“I have no sympathy with what may be called professional revivalism, nor with spasmodic efforts of any kind, nor with many of the prevalent methods…They are shallow…leaving behind no substantial addition to…the church’s power and life, but often creating an unhealthy appetite for exciting services and for a mere emotional religion. In all large towns…there is a kind of floating religious population, consisting of people who run after novelties, but have no taste for quiet, steady, persistent, solid Christian work…no reformation or amendment of life…Without strength they impart no strength…Special efforts, occasional excitements will only act as artificial stimulants, and will be followed by collapse again.”
The writer continued by explaining that we should learn from the testimony of what he called the “genuine spiritual movements” of history. He went on to say that what the churches need is not to up the entertainment value of their “Sunday product” but to repent of their superficiality and seek a deeper Baptism in the life of God, and to unite in prayer for this until the Lord might grant us to participate in the power and life which came upon those first believers on the day of Pentecost. A “renewal of the Pentecostal blessing”, he was certain, was what God wanted to mark the churches of the twentieth century.
This was a nineteenth century book written by an obscure Baptist pastor in Brighton, England. And there was plenty about this book that made those facts remarkable.
Firstly, I noted that William Crosbie was calling for a non-denominational response in an age of ultra-denominationalism. The 1800s were an age where denominational differences segregated towns, harboured all kinds of snobbery and were sometimes treated as matters of Gospel importance. It was an era where the Baptists had their missionary societies and the Anglicans had theirs. The Presbyterians had their publishing houses and the Congregationalists had theirs. The fact that Crosbie’s book was issuing a call to a Union of Prayer among Christians of any or every denomination who shared his concern for the churches of the age – that was revolutionary.
Secondly, I could see that, equally subversive, Crosbie was implicitly by-passing the leadership of the churches by issuing this call – in print form – to what in those days was patronizingly referred to as the “lay-person”. Crosbie did this because he knew that any lasting change had to be a grassroots change. So it was to the grassroots that he issued his call for this union of prayer. In an age of Empire and colonialism that was a very counter-cultural view of how progress could best be made. “What if he was right?” I wondered. What if lasting changes has to come from the grassroots? What kind of church-planting strategy would that translate into? What kind of role does that imply for the Pastor?
What I found particularly inspiring was the fact that Crosbie had looked at his own ministry and surveyed the wider church; had seen trends that worried him, and had not found a way forward. Yet instead of giving up he had gone for inspiration to the great cloud of witnesses (Heb.12.1,2) and humbly listened to the testimony of previous generations. In their lives Crosbie found stories which did motivate him, and he discerned a relay of genuine spiritual movements from one age to the next passing on the torch of authentic, genuine, powerful and fruitful ministry for the Kingdom of God.
But what gripped my attention more than anything was that this book had been published a full twenty years before the outbreak of that revival in Asuza Street in 1906 which was to transform the global face of Christianity through the twentieth century. I turned back to the start of the book and confirmed the details: Written 1885. Published 1886. All that being so, it had to be the case that Pastor Crosbie had never heard of “Pentecostals” or “Asuza Street”. Neither had he ever seen or tasted the “Pentecostal experience” or “deeper baptism” of which he wrote. Yet somehow, and with a passion, he knew it was the urgent need of the hour. I was awestruck, blown away by the writer’s unbelievable foresight.
It was obvious to me that Crosbie’s foresight flowed from his great appreciation of church-history. He had clearly spent a lot of time on his own, reading and thinking about things. The passion in his book suggested that this reading and thinking had led to a good deal of praying too. Through these activities – all of which belonged to the reclusion of the pastor’s study - had given Crosbie an amazing appreciation for where in Christian history the church of his day had reached, together with a deep feeling for the heart of God. By these means William Crosbie had gained a prophetic insight whose accuracy for the century ahead of him was nothing short of incredible.
The more disturbing realisation for me was that a full century after all that began at Asuza Street, somehow we seemed to have arrived right back where we started from. I couldn’t help feeling that the warnings and exhortations of this dusty, nineteenth century book could have been written directly to my own church that very year – and we were supposed to be a Pentecostal church for goodness sake! The deadness of a church meeting consisting only of sober hymns and a sober message may be easy to detect, but the deadness of an entertaining, multi-media assisted, Pentecostal meeting is no less worrying. Now, with Crosbie’s help, I began to discern this lack of life within my own church and my own ministry.
As I sat taking in the implications of that wonderful job offer I mentioned earlier, a couple of voices jostled in my head. One voice urging me away from this strategy of beginning a church with minimum commitment and maximum entertainment was the voice of an Italian brother from that great cloud of witnesses.
I had discovered that Italian brother through my own reading of “genuine spiritual movements” through history. His name was Benedict of Norcia (the subject of another of these articles). Benedict operated expressions of church which called upon people to join with a pledge of high-commitment and offered no novelties or entertainments to sugar-coat the pill. His was a residential expression of church which people joined only if they were in absolute earnest about wanting to change their lives for Jesus. Thousands chose it, and my reading had shown me that what had been achieved by those who followed Benedict’s approach, was almost unparalleled.
As I continued my readings in church history I found that residential-based, high-commitment expressions of church, seemed to constitute a pattern which repeated from generation to generation. Saint Aidan of Lindisfarne had learned this model of ministry from the work of Saint Patrick in Ireland and Saint Columba on Iona. I could see this model in the ministries of Saint Francis and Saint Clare of Assisi. I saw it in Saint Pachomius in the Nile delta; in William Booth and the first Salvationists. Similarly John Wesley had sought to re-express this life of close community in the Bands, Classes and Societies of first generation Methodism. All these were “genuine spiritual movements” to use William Crosbie’s phrase. All bore great Gospel fruit in their day, and had done so by following the very opposite of the strategy this salaried position was now offering me. They all began with a call to close-community and high commitment.
But that afternoon as I weighed up my job offer it was the voice of Pastor Crosbie which rang the loudest in my mind. Phrases of his like “…“professional revivalism… the raising of money… spasmodic efforts…unhealthy appetite for emotional excitement… artificial stimulants…followed by collapse” kept echoing round my head.
Through my own times of reclusion in my study, lost in reading, thought and prayer, the witness of these movements and my own inward response to them convinced me that God was calling me to something more radical; to take the risk of starting with few rather than with many; to begin not with low commitment but high commitment; and to a pattern of church based not on sharing an auditorium, but on the sharing of lives.
I wondered, “What if the next time I planted a church I began not with easy-come-easy-go but with a form of high commitment? What if instead of seeking to get to a solid core sometime in the future, we actually began with it? What if instead of hoping for genuine brotherhood and accountability at some later stage, we were to start with it? What if our efforts were no longer centred on the show we put on when gathered, but on something more life-changing?”
Thanks to William Crosbie I did not take up that job offer, for all its attractiveness. Instead I found myself set on a journey which would lead me to espouse values in ministry and give myself to expressions of community which were ultimately to overturn my whole approach to ministry and church-life. But that’s another story!