Lake and River
(THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PRINTED IN THE SALT MAGAZINE IN EARLY 2009)
We live in an age of great change and great challenges. Society has changed enormously in just a few short decades. A decade of growth has not just ground to a halt but has crashed into the buffers. Faced with change and challenge many would prefer to hide. But to do so is to miss all that God has in mind for us.
Change happens all the time; we have seen change occur at Springfield with new people joining the church. That’s exciting. Of course, change brings with it challenges. Challenges of welcoming people, challenges of ensuring that we are a real community; challenges of being caring and open to new people. It also brings with it challenges of a practical nature. There is a ‘rule’ that when a church gets 80% full then it is full. This is because people feel uncomfortable coming into a church that is fuller than 80%. As a Church we are often at that point on Sunday mornings; and if that is the case then Springfield will have peaked and there will only be one way for us to go unless we do something!
But in addition to the practical considerations there is the need for us to look to see what God is calling us to. There has been a growing certainty, in my mind at least, that God is calling us to change. To help us be more. With that in mind I asked Phil Potter, the director of Pioneer Ministry in Liverpool diocese, to come and lead a leaders’ away day last November to help us look at how we might change. It was an inspirational day for those there and gave us much food for thought in some of the changes that we might make.
The key insight that Phil shared with us was that of building on our cell values to become a Lake and River Church. Phil pointed out that:
The bible uses the imagery of water in many ways to describe the character and activity of God. His love offers cleansing and forgiveness and his power flows freely as his presence brings life. At St Mark’s [Phil’s home Church] we celebrate and welcome this life and we find the imagery of lake and river helpful in describing and defining it.
Lakes first of all tend to form in settled places, where they become an oasis to the life around them. In the same way, we want our church to be an oasis and source of life to the community around. As well as offering a full range of worship services, we also provide an extensive range of community services where people of all ages can connect and enjoy a quality of life that flows directly from our faith and our God-given values.
Then there’s the river, that is still a part of the lake and connected at source, but as it flows it can move into many more and different places wherever the ground gives way. Over the years, St Mark’s has increasingly become a pioneering church. Its life has been flowing far beyond its doors, encouraging life to other places and seeking to bring new life to other parts of the church. More recently we have begun to plant new forms of church that can connect in fresh ways beyond the neighbourhood and into various networks, from work places to schools and hobby based groups.
[St mark’s is].. a community that still honours and cherishes all that it has inherited from the past, but also wants to embrace and pioneer the new future that God in His love is offering a struggling world.
So in Lake Church we continue to receive and refresh and re-imagine in order that God can renew all that He has blessed us with.
We look to receive all that God has for us by going deeper into our relationship with Him, looking to see in what ways He wants to deepen and strengthen our faith and relationship with Him.
At the same time we need to look at how He wants to refresh what we have. If you paint your house white and never paint it again then over time the paint starts to flake and grows dirty and dull. If you want the house to remain white then it needs upkeep. The same is true for us. If we try to hang on to what we have without change then it starts to flake and go a different colour. Only by refreshing what God has given us will we keep our focus clear and fresh. We’ve seen the children and youth ministries refreshed by new visions for these ministries. We’ve seen our small groups refreshed by becoming cell groups and being active in supporting charities, creating community and social outreach.
Now we need to look at some re-imagining. This is the stage where we look at our guiding values and think through which areas we need to build on to honour God. Asking ourselves which areas is God challenging us in? What areas do we need to change? One of the key areas that we need to look at is our Sunday worship. As we’ve grown in numbers on a Sunday morning we need to look at our ‘Lake’ and how we could re-imagine it. We need to look at how we make space for new people; but we also need to look at how we can widen our offering – how do we include people who have different styles of worship or different learning styles? There is always a tension offering a one size fits all in that it is a compromise to try and keep everyone on board. We have those who love meditative worship and others who love exuberant worship. We have those who are visual learners and others who learn by doing and others who learn through hearing. We have those who are young and those who are “less young”!! We have those who like rap music and those who love opera. We are diverse in our likes and personalities – and that is wonderful and God-honouring. So not only are we being “driven” to look at a new service for practical reasons but it allows us to develop the range of people we can meet with different offerings. This might happen in a whole variety of different ways - through a separate service on a different site, at a different time or simultaneously at the School. We can’t judge what God might call us to do without prayer, discernment and wisdom. We hope to bring a proposal to the leaders’ away day in May and if there is a discernment that it “seems right to us and the Holy Spirit” then we hope to launch a second service in the autumn.
Now the danger comes if we only focus on the Lake. We are blessed in the Wallington area in that there are a good number of healthy churches with hundreds of people belonging to them. The other side is that there are therefore thousands of people who do not belong to a church and have never been to a church.
River Church is aimed at reaching out to those who have never been to church – usually reckoned to be about 50% of the population. They are rarely interested in lake forms of church. So how do we reach out to them with the love of Christ? We search for common ground. We seek to meet people where they are rather than expect them to meet us where we are.
A good example of this, for us, is Footprints which meets at Highview school once a month – where most people coming have no connection with Church, but the style is that recognised by the parents and children as that of the school and this, along with the relationships built up by Sue as an ex teacher there, enables them to feel that there is common ground that can be shared. Phil Potter had a similar experience in Haydock which he describes in his forthcoming book:
When our family first arrived in Haydock, we planted a congregation in the local primary school, Legh Vale. It followed good practice in church planting as we understood it at the time. This meant that we gathered a team together, took the best of what we did in the church on a Sunday morning, and transferred it into the school. The model was fine and the congregation grew, but it didn’t really have much impact on the school community itself. Essentially, we had moved our church culture into the school building, whenever it was empty, and school continued separately from Monday to Friday. Eventually, after the church was reordered, we left the school and regrouped for a time in the new church building, developing a multi congregation model instead.
Fifteen years later, however, we planted again into the same school, only this time it looked dramatically different. The aim now was to connect as a church with the school community itself, but not by the traditional route of using assembly and teaching slots. By now, there was a small group of Christian teachers, classroom assistants, parents and grandparents who were all part of the life of the school, and the school itself was actively looking for community partnerships. Interestingly, the group was led by my wife, Joy, who over the years had deliberately followed her passion for children, and invested the greater part of her life and ministry there. In fact, she became far better acquainted with the local families than her husband the vicar ever did, and over the years had won the affection and respect of the people she’d served. Not surprisingly, then, when she announced a new venture for the school community, it had an immediate and direct impact. They knew she was the vicar’s wife and, more important, a Christian herself, so there was a natural assumption that something called ‘Famlegh First’, that met on a Sunday morning, would obviously have God in it. What was important for them, however, was the relationship and trust that already existed, along with the ‘what we have in common’ element.
Now, of course, it can be nerve-wracking to set out on the adventure of going down a river. This is why we need to go with others, building teams, to encourage, support and build one another up. It is an adventure but by going on it we receive so much. We grow together, we see God at work so much, and we see that people are so open when we meet them where they are starting from. We see in the Gospels Jesus meeting people where they were and engaging them with their agendas – a classic being the woman at the well in John Chapter 4. Many of you will have different ideas and visions and dreams of the impact that we could have on our communities. So often these start off as small mustard seeds of ideas, involving a few like-minded people looking to make extra-ordinary differences. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see lots of small mustard seed ministries grow up in the coming months?
What we need to be, as a church, is focussed on both Lake and River. Some will be gifted to work in the Lake, others gifted in the River. Some will be surprised that they thought that they were Lake people but discover that they are actually River people – and vice versa. Neither is more than the other, both are important to invest in. That’s why, this year, we will be continuing to see what God is calling us to be and to do. Looking at how we can grow the Lake side and also discerning what Rivers we are called to go down – indeed whether we see that this is the way that God is calling us to go.
Will
